On a recent sunny morning, Michael Bailey was weeding rows of vegetables and picking peppers from gardens on county-owned land in Swanville as part of a program to help him transition back to society after 15 years of incarceration.
“It’s so therapeutic just to get your hands in the dirt, water stuff and watch it grow,” said Bailey, whose sentence ends in 14 weeks.
Bailey, who earned his bachelor’s degree and Master Gardener certificate while incarcerated, looked out over the rows of peppers, potatoes, onions and sweet corn and the rolling hay fields that slope down to the Goose River.
“We’re just in a beautiful place,” he said.
Known to most simply as the County Garden, the Maine Coastal Regional Reentry Center Garden is fertile ground in many senses. It grows hundreds of thousands of pounds of produce for the emergency food system and provides job-training and rehabilitation to people preparing to reenter society after being incarcerated. And in recent years, it’s opened its fields to Waldo County Bounty to grow food to distribute throughout the county and, this year, to plant breeders developing new varieties of vegetables.
“There’s so much space here, there’s a lot of potential,” said Viña Lindley, who as a Horticulture Professional at UMaine Cooperative Extension, works closely with Waldo County Bounty and Master Gardener volunteers at the site. “It’s a really unique asset that Waldo County has.”
The County Garden, which started in Swanville around 15 years ago, has long partnered with Waldo County Bounty, a local anti-hunger group that operates more than 20 Give and Take Tables throughout the county, by donating produce. But last year, Waldo County Bounty started growing its own food at its site to diversify its offerings and augment the donations it gets from the county garden and buys from local farmers, Lindley said.
The partnership also means more volunteers to share the workload of running the garden, Lindley said.
“It’s working out really beautifully,” she said.
This year, Lindley has also helped set up partnerships with plant breeders and researchers developing new varieties of melon, pumpkins and potatoes. Because the breeders only use a small portion of the crops they grow, the rest will be donated through Waldo County Bounty and to other anti-hunger groups.
At its heart, the garden remains a place where men preparing to leave the criminal justice system can grow and heal. Giving back and gaining trust is a central part of that, says Dale Cross, the garden’s director, who was the longtime executive director of Waldo County YMCA before retiring eight years ago.
“Trust is a trigger word,” he said. “A lot of these guys have never been trusted and given the opportunity, the chance, to be trusted.”
The men working in the garden are all residents at the Maine Coastal Regional Reentry Center in Belfast. Housed in the former County Jail and run by Volunteers of America Northern New England and the Waldo County Sheriff’s Office, the center is a unique program that takes men who are within 18 months of finishing their sentences but who, without additional support, would be considered to be at risk of returning to the criminal justice system after being released.
Sex offenders and people who have committed violent crimes are not eligible. The center’s residents do community service at a number of sites in the county, such as Habitat for Humanity and the Thorndike Mill & Meeting Place, which is being restored as a community space. Some residents also work for local businesses.
Timothy Klepser, a resident of the reentry center who worked at the farm for the first time on Monday, said he was excited to have a chance to work outdoors and give back to the community.
“You have to really want to change yourself,” he said. “This program isn’t for guys that just want to screw around and continue to do the same thing.”
Having a sense of purpose helps people who are released from prison stay out, he said.
“You actually mean something to yourself and other people,” he said.
Jonathan Woodley, another center resident, said that in the two years before he was incarcerated he was addicted to drugs and not contributing to the community.
“I just was not a productive member of society,” he said.
Now he’s working to repair those ties.
“Community is where it starts, so it just kind of helps me reinforce my community roots again,” he said.
The importance of finishing strong is a key lesson that Cross tries to impart. Sometimes the men get tired by the end of the day, doing physical labor in the sun. He tells them that people remember the last 15 minutes, whether it’s at the end of a game or a workday. A bad ending can overshadow anything good that came before.
The garden is helping set the men up to finish their sentences strong as well – to build up the skills, confidence and sense of pride and purpose as they get ready to reenter society and build a new life.
“For someone who’s been incarcerated, having something to be proud of may be quite a way back in their memory,” he said. “So they work very hard out here. They’re very, very proud of these gardens.”
