Cairo, New York
Sat. August 22 - Sun. August 23, 2026

The Understory Weekend

Bask in the canopy shade and forage the late-summer woods.

Join a two-day immersion at a working forest farm, with shiitake harvests, guided foraging, and (our favorite) a mushroom-infused log to bring home. We’ll help pack your lunch.

Stay in a reclaimed inn that’s re-sprouted as a frill-less Catskillian escape.

Dine at a place dedicated to a shortform menu with ingredients from a single Columbia County farm.

As always, your stay, meal and local experience are arranged for you in a tap.

Get the full story for the weekend.

Where you’re going: into the shadow of the Catskills, just as they start to rise up out of the Hudson River Valley.

This Overnight is a compact little triangle between Cairo, Catskill and Hudson, with each stop about 10–15 minutes from one another.

The Catskills by Asher Brown Durand (1859)

Why here?

The question is, can you get to Cairo, NY by roughly 9:30am on Saturday morning?

It’s 2 hours and 15 minutes-ish up from New York City, and if you can do this thing — that is, get out of the house by 7am and tear off for the Catskills — you’re going to be just in time to pop into a very delightful cafe in town, pick out an already-paid-for lunch that you’ll bring with you into a forest, and by mid-morning you’ll be cultivating mushrooms on a log. You get to bring the log home.

What is all this?

Read on or

Jump to what's included

Black cohosh and American spikenard. Aplenty in these woods.

It’s a very unique (and very specific, so no offense taken if this is not your speed) weekend of forest farming. A forest farm is like a regular farm in that it’s designed to be a productive environment for growing things; but here the growing is done inside the honest-to-goodness woods. There’s no clear-cutting timber for a field because there is no field. It’s trees.

Beginning Saturday morning, the nature education organization Wild Hudson Valley is inviting you to do some serious forest farming: over two days, you’ll get to be part of an operation that spans 95 acres of stewarded land. You’ll explore the mushroom laying yard, and the ginseng garden, and learn raised-bed cultivation techniques for wild plants. And you’ll plant things yourself, right in the middle of the trees.

Black cohosh and American spikenard, left and right. Aplenty in these woods.

Bloodroot. More beautiful than we were imagining.

You’ll get to see the amazing set of things that can be sustainably cultivated in what’s called the understory; the knee-high enmeshment of vegetation that lives in a kind of nether-category between ground and canopy. Much of what can be grown here is delicious (if you know what’s what, and of course you shouldn’t ever eat something you’re not absolutely sure of).

What we especially love about this weekend is that you’ll get to inoculate your very own log with shiitake mushrooms, and take it home as a living keepsake that’s likely to produce crops of beautiful/delicious shiitakes every year. We are suckers for a good take-home element, and this one is so good.

The Cairo Fossil Forest, and its 385 million-year-old root system. Photo: the Town of Cairo.

Be warned that this is more or less two full mornings and afternoons in the woods; you have to bring your own lunch with you, but we have a plan.

Also, there is a backcountry-style bathroom situation (the situation is that there is no bathroom for part of the day on Saturday, and during almost all of the activities on Sunday). But this all makes it fun, and sometimes a little inconvenience is good proof you’re getting a real, unglamped experience.

And there’s no better place for a woodsy experience than Cairo. Just outside of town, there are vestiges of the oldest known forest in North America, with a still-visible fossilized root system that was inhaling nutrients from this soil 385 million years ago. This place is a very old hand at growing things.

So come and farm in the shade of the treetops. Snap a few twigs and get the dirt caked in between your fingers, and be part of the life of the understory.

This weekend in the forest, discover:

The stay.

The Willow

You’ll need a tree-named inn for this weekend.

At the base of the Catskills, The Willow is a revived mid-century roadside motel that brothers Michael and Greg Arnold bought in 2018 and gradually brought back to life.

There are 13 rooms and shared spaces with vintage furnishings and Catskills memorabilia, and a tavern with a 19th-century oak bar.

It’s a good place to collapse into after the forest, and a nice continuation of the peacefulness.


Reservations made, pre-paid for Saturday night.

The day.

Down on the (Forest ) Farm

For two days, Wild Hudson Valley turns the forest understory into a working farm.

Saturday is fungi. You’ll walk the mushroom yard, harvest shiitakes straight from the logs, look for wild mushrooms and learn how to cultivate your own on freshly cut timber. Then you’ll prepare a fresh log to grow shiitakes of its own, and you’ll take it with you.

Sunday goes deeper into the understory: woods-grown beds and crops including ramps, goldenseal and black cohosh. The focus is how these forest botanicals can be stewarded and cultivated beneath an existing canopy rather than clearing the land to farm it.

Both sessions run 10:30 a.m.–2:30 p.m., entirely outdoors. Lunch needs to come with you into the woods (we’ve got a plan, below).

The find.

The Quiet Botanist

How perfect that this is here.

The Quiet Botanist is a small-ish apothecary in Hudson (nearby to dinner) filled with dried flowers, wild-crafted botanicals, tea infusions, candles and all sorts of things with a tinge of wildness.

Hudson has some wonderful boutique shopping, but this place is too on-theme not to stop in and get a potion of some sort.

The food.

See & Be Kitchen + Restaurant Manor Rock

The food plan starts early in Cairo on Saturday morning.

$150 at See & Be Kitchen is included for the weekend, enough to cover breakfast and a packed lunch for two on both Saturday and Sunday. This is a sourdough bakery that uses a 24-hour fermentation process, and you should make everything you order as bread-based as possible.

The forest-farming intensive asks you to bring lunch into the woods each day, so this takes care of that particular piece of logistics: stop in before the workshop, get breakfast and choose what you want to pack to go.

Saturday night, we recommend skipping across the Hudson to Restaurant Manor Rock, which is a sort of dining-room expression of its own farm in nearby Taghkanic. Its menu changes with what the farm is producing, drawing on its vegetables, herbs, flowers and heritage-breed pigs (!). Exactly the spot for this weekend.

For lunch: $150 gift included for two travelers; $75 for one traveler.

For dinner: You have reservations for 7pm on Saturday evening. Dinner isn’t pre-paid, but the reservation can be tough, so that’s already locked in.

The tucked away.

Mawignack Preserve


Just outside Catskill, Mawignack Preserve spreads across 144 acres of meadow, woods and creek, with a mile-long loop that eventually slips down to the edge of Catskill Creek.

The painter Thomas Cole (one of the founders of the Hudson River School art movement in the 19th century) returned to this landscape repeatedly for subject matter. The same rounding mountains and tree lines are right there today.

“Nature has spread for us a rich and delightful banquet,” said Cole in a lecture before the Catskill Lyceum in 1841, “Shall we turn from it?”

The evening mood.

Photo: Public Domain, NY Heritage Digital Collection

Promenade Hill Park

In Hudson, before dinner, go to the end of Warren Street.

Promenade Hill, looking west over the water, has been a public park since 1795. It’s dotted above the Hudson with the Catskills tumbling off across the opposite horizon, and people have been coming here to take in essentially this same view for more than two centuries.

We’re never great at being productively reflective in a place that’s clearly intended for staring off at sunset mountains, and musing on something. It’s pressure, honestly, like writing something terrific on expensive stationery.

But here is a good wide-angle ending to a day spent looking at very small sprouts of life.

Let us arrange it for you in a tap.

This Overnight includes:

  • Your stay at The Willow, Saturday, August 22, 2026.

  • A gift card to Cairo’s See & Be Kitchen, to help provision yourself for lunch in the woods on Saturday and Sunday. $150 credit for two travelers, or $75 for one traveler.

  • 7pm dinner reservations at Restaurant Manor Rock in Hudson.

  • Admission to Wild Hudson Valley’s two-day forest farm intensive, and ownership of your own shiitake-covered log.

So how does this work?
No payment is needed just yet. Send us your request, and we’ll make sure the weekend is ready on our end. Then we’ll email you a secure payment link. Once you’re booked, we’ll send the key details: check-in, addresses, timing and reservation notes.

For now, just let us know you’d like us to get going.

This Overnight is independently curated. The hotels, restaurants, and experiences in this piece are not affiliated or partnered with us unless specifically stated, and we select and package all our weekend components editorially. Inclusion in this story is not a promotion or paid advertisement.