On a Saturday in mid-October, when the last of the pumpkins are still on the vine and the hardwood ridges above the Androscoggin have begun to turn, working landscapes scattered across Auburn will open their gates to anyone who wants to walk in. The 3rd Annual Auburn Farm & Forest Tour runs Saturday, Oct. 17, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., and it is free, self-guided, and open to all.
The premise is simple and, in an era of ticketed agritourism, unusual: no admission, no single staging area, no shuttle. Visitors build their own route from a list of stops that runs from the city's rural edges to its in-town schoolyards. At Woodlot Trail Forestry Management on Hobart Road, the subject is forest management itself. At Life Forest Whistle Ridge on Trapp Road, a farm hosts a conservation cemetery and woodland trail burials. Along Sopers Mill Road, three separate operations sit within a few miles of one another: Farmer's Family Gardens, Valley View Farm, and Open Heart Farm. On South Witham Road, WISH Farm & Shearing raises livestock on rotational pasture and sells lamb and raw fleece, while a neighboring Homestead and Family Farm rounds out that stretch.
Closer to the city center, the tour includes the Community Forestry Board Tree Nursery on North Auburn Road, the ReTreeUS orchard at Park Avenue School on Park Avenue, Bell Farms on Riverside Drive, the Land Lab at Evergreen Outdoor Education on Andrew Drive, a Chestnuts Across Maine grove tucked behind the PAL property on Chestnut Street, and Pam's Garden on West Auburn Road.
The through-line is that these are not all the same kind of place. A commercial vegetable farm, a sheep operation, a school orchard, a municipal tree nursery, a working woodlot, and a chestnut restoration planting share the same afternoon. That range is the point. Auburn's Natural Products & Agricultural Working Group, which organizes the tour, exists to connect the city's agricultural and forestry operations with the residents who live among them, and the tour is its most public expression of that work.
The event is now in its third year, which makes it young but no longer a one-off experiment. The city's own promotion of an earlier edition described the same invitation in nearly the same words: "Auburn is home to many incredible farms, homesteads, forestry operations and other agricultural gems." The format has held steady across the years, and so has the roster's character, mixing production agriculture with education and conservation.
Several of the stops carry stories that reward a closer look. ReTreeUS, the nonprofit behind the Park Avenue School orchard, has been planting school and community orchards since 2012 and reports 108 educational orchards planted, more than 4,200 trees in the ground, and roughly 143,000 pounds of fruit harvested. Its founder came to the work through years as an outdoor educator and farmer in Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, California, and Costa Rica. The orchard on Park Avenue is one of that network's local outposts.
The Community Forestry Board Tree Nursery on North Auburn Road is a shared enterprise between two cities. The Lewiston Auburn Community Forestry Board, working with the municipal arborists of both Auburn and Lewiston, established a field nursery in Auburn where small trees are grown out for street planting. Maine Audubon has partnered on stewardship days there, and the nursery has become a model cited in broader efforts to develop community tree nurseries around the state. For a tour visitor, it is a chance to see the municipal forestry pipeline before the trees ever reach a curb.
The Chestnuts Across Maine planting behind the PAL property belongs to a much longer project. The initiative is run by the Maine chapter of The American Chestnut Foundation, which partners with land trusts, state parks, schools, and town squares to establish small plantings of American chestnuts on publicly accessible land. The chapter's stated vision is that by 2035, anyone in Maine who wants to see a living American chestnut will find one less than an hour's drive from home, and that chestnut trees will be thriving within a ten-minute walk of every school in the state. The Auburn grove is one of the small, public plantings meant to make that vision concrete, and it sits, improbably, behind a city recreation property.
Life Forest Whistle Ridge represents yet another use of working land. The farm has committed a protected parcel to Life Forest, a conservation cemetery offering woodland trail burials, described as the organization's first premier woodland burial location. It is the kind of stop that would rarely appear on a conventional farm tour, and its presence on the list says something about how broadly this event defines agriculture and land use.
Valley View Farm, on Sopers Mill Road, farms about 75 acres at its main location plus another 40 acres nearby at what it calls Tuckaway Farm. Until 2007, a great deal of that land was in tree growth, meaning the fields visitors will walk this October were forest within the last two decades. WISH Farm & Shearing, meanwhile, describes itself as pasture-raising livestock with rotational grazing intended to improve soils and grasses, selling lamb and raw fleece, a reminder that the region's fiber economy is still alive alongside its food economy.
The tour also functions as a low-stakes introduction to people who grow food for a living. Farmers staff their own stops, and the Good Food Council of Lewiston-Auburn, one of the event's partners, frames the day as a chance to "see how they function and meet your farmers." To encourage people to range widely rather than settle on one stop, each participating farm hands out stickers for a passport. Visitors who collect stamps at six or more locations are entered into a raffle for a basket of local goodies.
The passport mechanic is a small thing, but it shapes the day. Six stops out of thirteen means a visitor has to leave the Sopers Mill Road cluster, or the South Witham Road cluster, and cross town, which is precisely the outcome the organizers seem to want: not a single farm visit, but a mental map of how much agricultural land Auburn actually contains. The prize is deliberately modest, a basket of local products rather than a headline draw, and the event remains free.
The tour is a collaboration. Auburn's Natural Products & Agricultural Working Group organizes it, with support from the Good Food Council of Lewiston-Auburn and the School Based Food Hub. The Good Food Council traces its own roots to 2008, when a group then called Local Food for Lewiston began a Community Food Assessment, a multi-year study of the city's food landscape undertaken with the St. Mary's Nutrition Center, Bates College, the University of Southern Maine, Healthy Androscoggin, and the Downtown Education Collaborative. That assessment focused on where food resources are, how people reach them, and what barriers stand in the way. The council adopted its current regional name in 2011, recognizing that food issues do not stop at the city line, and it has been working on the Lewiston-Auburn food system ever since.
That history explains the shape of the tour. An event that puts a municipal tree nursery and a chestnut restoration grove on the same list as a pumpkin farm is not really a fall festival. It is an argument, made by opening gates, that a city's food system includes its forests, its schoolyards, its soil, and its seed stock, and that the public has a standing invitation to see how all of it works.
For anyone planning to go, the practical advice is the same as it has been since the first edition: pick a starting point, allow more time than you think you need, and leave room to stop at places you did not plan on. The tour runs 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Saturday, Oct. 17, at locations across Auburn, Maine. It is free, and all are welcome.