Stonegate Farm

Stonegate Farm Organic Estate Farm, Skincare & Wellness () Farm-to-Table Suppers, Event Venue.

Organic skincare & wellness, prix-fixe suppers, events, workshops, apothecary, yoga, sound bathing

08/29/2026

September is our favorite month at Stonegate, with the gardens expressing all of their beguiling vitality! Suppers are selling out fast! Book your tickets using our Eventbrite link in bio.

08/25/2026

Hard to believe, but summer is winding down and fall is around the corner. The farm is gorgeous this time of year! Hope to see you at Stonegate.

08/22/2026

Late summer evenings at the farm, when all the preening perennial life leans into the last splinters of light. Keep it simple: A garden, a few cats, someone to love.

"It is often easier to be in the mind, to lean into the known world, rather than the unmapped and uncanny territory of the soul and spirit. Goethe confessed that “The things I know, every man can know, but, oh, my heart is mine alone!” and the garden needs to be as much a personal immersion into the spirit of place–the particular mirror of your soul that it reflects–as it needs to be a practical, thriving place for plants to live.

I would suggest that the garden appeals to us precisely because it is beyond fully knowing, because it holds out perplexity that no amount of science or interrogation can fully explain. And why does it need explaining anyway? Explaining is cognitive, beauty is limbic. The rhyme and meter of poem won’t explain its compelling beauty, any more than will the rhythm and melody of a piece of music.

The best art should never need to explain itself."

From my latest book Cultivating Beauty: A Garden of Wellness & Wonder (Timber Press 2027).
Matthew Benson Timber Press Stonegate Farm, New York Cultivate Apothecary Matthew Benson Foto

08/17/2026

Mornings in late summer at Stonegate are an invocation. This is from my next book, Cultivating Beauty (Timber Press)

"The more lush and sensory the garden, the more hedonic its spell. Formal, manicured spaces keep us at a distance: they impress us with their Cartesian control, their compositional rigor, but they can also disaffect us with too much calculated symmetry. If we truly want to see ourselves in the garden, to see a reflection that is beautifully imperfect–like all of us–then we need to embrace the duality of control and release. Nature may be infinitely patterned, but it's also infinitely random. It can speak in codes of recurrence: season, rhythm, geometry, proportion, order. It can also wildly improvise its intentions without restraint. That's why we can certainly plan our gardens, but we can't always predict them. We can decide how we want to be in our gardens, however. Some of us speak to our plants, or sing to them. Some of us dance, some of us meditate. Some of us study and observe. Some of us compulsively labor. Some of us vamp. Some of us graze. Some of us do all of the above. There are no rules, no orthodoxy. Just the intentional unlearning of limitation."

Matthew Benson
Timber Press
Matthew Benson Foto

08/14/2026

Suppers are happening through the end of September at the farm! Get your tkts through our Eventbrite link in bio!

08/11/2026

Every season our botanicals deliver their healing energetics to our programs and products, from organic hydrosols distilled for our spa partners, to botanical elixirs used in our supper and wellness programs. Abundance.

08/02/2026

When a garden begins to love you back...after all the late winter seed starting, planting and cultivating there's a moment mid-season when you're embraced by abundance. That's when you feel it.

"I often step out into my farm and garden at early twilight into what the French poetically call “l’heure Bleue” (the blue hour) and into the half-light. There’s a sense of unknowing at this time, of trespass. Night creatures unaccustomed to my presence quiet themselves in the beds and brambles, even the plants, in the cool and color-muted moonlight, seems strange and other, as though caught in flagrante in the inscrutable darkness. It’s a magical time of suspension before the coming day, a threshold. Why lope about in the pale gloaming? It’s way to narrow the senses, to limit distraction, to feel differently in the garden. To walk into unknown air, freed from the brilliant asperities of daylight, into a realm of heightened scent and touch and sound. One has to be a sensorial seeker for this to matter, of course, but what is a garden if not a place to rouse yourself with sensation?

Beginning the day early in the garden, allowing your body and spirit to align with the waking world, is an expression of presence: We are not elsewhere (the virtual), we are inside the moment (the now), we are infused with life (connected to the energetics of the grounding, abundant earth). All living beings benefit from this form of reconnection, preferably when the day begins. For some, the garden is deeply relational. It's a love affair not only with cultivated space, but with a community of flowering and fruiting lives. We develop connections and relationships with our gardens that are surely about cultivation and care, but also–ultimately– about our own soul's journey. The garden becomes an extension of the giving, loving self and it rewards us with its own caring reciprocity.

If you love a garden long enough, it begins to love you back."

Excerpt from my new book Cultivating Beauty: A Garden of Wellness & Wonder (Timber Press 2027)

Matthew Benson Stonegate Farm, New York Cultivate Apothecary Matthew Benson Foto

07/30/2026

We're entering the season of abundance now at the farm, and will be in it for the next few months - cultivating, harvesting, formulating, serving community. It all adds meaning and purpose.

"There’s an imperative now, more than ever, to find our way back to the garden, both literally and metaphorically. The philosopher and social reformer Rudolph Steiner saw humans as stewards of the Earth, with the potential to either harmonize with or disrupt nature's spiritual order. “The Earth will be a co**se in the future if man has not developed the spiritual forces that are meant to pour vitality into it.” And so we need to invest our vitality back into the fragile mantle of our existence, into the living, breathing earth, the source of all life. It’s not in our churches, or institutions, or corporations or temporal distractions, but all around us in the paths we walk, the gardens we tend, the lives we nurture. It’s in the marvel of mountains and the affluence of oceans. “The wisdom of nature is an eternal book,” Steiner wrote. “By learning its language, one grows closer to the divine source of all life.”

From Cultivating Beauty: A Garden of Wellness & Wonder (Timber Press, 2027)

Follow Matthew Benson for pre-sale updates.
Timber Press Matthew Benson Foto Cultivate Apothecary

Address

4 Stonegate Drive
Balmville, NY
12550

Website

Alerts

Be the first to know and let us send you an email when Stonegate Farm posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Shortcuts

Share

Category