Giant's Belly Farm is our name for JED's subsistence vegetable gardens, medicine gardens, and young, growing orchard. Our name, "Giant's Belly" is part of an emerging, collectively-written story about the land we live on and care for. You can read the latest version here. 

The Veggie Gardens

With major help from MOFGA gardening apprentices each summer, we cultivate a diverse variety of vegetables and root crops in various beds, totaling about an acre of garden space. Most collective members contribute in some way to the growing, harvesting and preservation of this food, depending on their abilities and means. The collective supports a "Farm Manager" with a seasonal living wage to coordinate collective work in the gardens and to make sure that everything gets attended to when needed.

Our long term-vision for the gardens is to increase our own subsistence production to become fully self-sufficient in crops like garlic, potatoes, tomatoes, carrots, beets, etc. (we're very close to this now with many of these crops), and to increase our tiny (2 family) Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program, selling sliding-scale shares of ecologically-grown food to more families in our community.  To accomplish these goals, we're hoping for some new additions to the JED community-- people who are passionate about ecological agriculture and about connecting low-income communities with healthy, affordable locally-grown food. 

The Pantry & Medicine Garden

The pantryroom is full of homegrown food and medicine. Our pantry holds it's presence in the house throughout the year, becoming full in the fall and emptied again by the time mid summer hits. Throughout the harvest season, our kitchen is bustling with energy to put up and store the garden's bounty. Come winter the garden beds will be asleep, dreaming of the next spring growth. And yet in our pantry, those vegetables, fruits and medicines still remain, having preserved them in the peek of their production.

Upon walking into the pantry, one would see the deep reds of the tomato; the dark purple of blueberry jam, and the bright yellow of dried calendula flower. While vegetables and fruits are our mainstay, JED's herbal apothecary claims almost a quarter of the pantry space. We don't get sick often, but when we do there's a good supply of natural medicines to help us get better. We preserve medicinal herbs in a number of ways, depending on the herb and it's use. Our apothecary holds medicines in the form of dry herbs for teas and decoctions, oils, salves, creams, liquid extracts, syrups, lozenges, and capsules.

The majority of our medicines are made from plants grown or growing right here on the mountainside. Many of our medicinals are gardened along with the vegetables, interspersed throughout the landscape as companion plants. However we do cultivate a large garden that holds medicinal perennials and any herbs grown in large quantity. What we don't garden is then wildcrafted from the abundant ecosystems around us, or bartered and bought from other herbalists.

The Orchard

Since 2006, we have been building a substantial and diverse orchard of apples, pears, plums, peaches, apricots, blueberries, grapes, hardy kiwis, chestnuts, walnuts,  hazelnuts and more. The orchard will provide the JED community and friends with all of our fruit and nut needs once these trees and vines come into full production (it's a long-term project, to be sure: some of the apples won't start producing for another 4-6 years). But we'll have a lot more than we need! Ethan (who's passion for fruit trees is boundless) is planning to create a "Community Supported Orchard" to add to the future vegetable CSA: offering seasonal shares of diverse fruits to local families.

MOFGA Summer Gardening Apprenticeship Program

We grow, process and root cellar about 70% of all our year-round food, and with the help of energetic and hard working MOFGA apprentices, have built healthy soil and well managed gardens over the years. Our gardening program integrates both urban and rural farming by providing apprentices the opportunity to work part of the week with Lots To Gardens, an urban community gardening project that focuses on empowering Lewiston city youth.The apprentices live within the JED community during their apprenticeship and work two days a week on the Giant's Belly Farm in exchange. 

For six years now we've been providing this education in organic farming methods and collective or "solidarity based living" to the apprentices who come through every summer. In addition, we host a major annual public event called The Garlic Gathering where we press apples and plant garlic with a hundred or so people each October. Along the way, we've also hosted numerous projects and presentations that have worked to connect local farmers with international agriculture and farmland struggles.