Garden Pause till Spring 2025
After years of unrelenting racial harassment and threats, the Jane Minor BIPOC Community Medicine Garden was forced to temporarily shut down the majority of its operations in early 2024. Due to this ongoing violence, amanda, her family and the garden are in the process of relocating for their safety.
For more information about the multi-year struggle which lead to need for relocation , please see the following articles/podcasts:
We are excited to announce however that through the support of community near and far, the garden will continue! The relocation is happening and the garden will be starting fresh this year in a safe, beautiful, accessible location where we can continue and expand our offerings to the BIPOC community!
We invite you to follow along on our relocation and expansion journey by signing up for our mailing list. Also, please be in touch if you are interested in being a part of our community or individual garden beds in 2025!
We also invite you to join in the incredible wave of support that is making our relocation financially possible through our fundraising efforts. We are almost to our goal and every dollar raised helps make sure our garden sanctuary dream continues to build healing community well into the future. We need safe spaces to heal, organize, grow, and build relationships, now. Community is our lifeline.
The Jane Minor BIPOC Community Medicine Garden is a dream and a future.
It was brought to life in honor of the herbalist, healer and emancipator, Jane Minor and my grandmother Jane Green who grew food, medicine and family.
The garden is a sanctuary for BIPOC folks to come together to connect with the Earth, the Plants, the Community, and with themselves. The garden has communal beds for all to freely enjoy, tend and harvest, as well as individual beds for folks to steward as they like, in accordance with our garden ethos.
The garden, located on intersections of both Gayogohó:no' and Onöñda’gega’ land, just southeast of Ithaca, NY, also has a community herb drying shed and hoop house as well as a classroom space, lending library of herb books and tools, a free farm-fresh egg fridge, and a free herbal medicine cabinet. Classes, work parties, food and medicine mutual aid and garden events happen regularly throughout the growing season.
The garden is made possible through the work of many hands and community support. Please stay tuned for ways to join in the work in 2025.
2025 Garden Memberships and Events will be announced soon!
if you are interested in tending and harvesting food and medicine from our communal beds and/or if you are interested in stewarding your own bed in the garden, please join our mailing list for updates and information!
How Our Garden Grows
BIOREGIONAL
We center bioregionalism- looking at the native, common, abundant plants of our region that help support and balance local ecosystems, including people.
BIPOC centered
As a space committed to healing from legacies of colonial violence on land and the liberation of all people, we believe the garden must center the needs of the most marginalized among us in overarching white supremacist, capitalist systems. We center and celebrate our Queer, Trans, Disabled, Chronically Ill, Mentally Ill, Femme, Poor, Immigrant, Refugee, Fat and Darkskin community.
No one is free until we are all free.
Reciprocity & Regeneration
We know land is not something to be owned or controlled. We build practices to attune ourselves to the specificity of this land. We know and care for the land as a very alive, highly intelligent, breathing, sensing body. We know the plants, the fungi, the soil, and the water as sentient beings that we are working with-in consensual, co-defined collaboration and towards mutual flourishing. Their needs, wants, and autonomy are as important as our own. Because of this, we believe all landwork must start with introducing yourself, stating your intentions, and asking permission–waiting to receive an answer before engaging, giving thanks throughout, and taking only what is needed. This receptivity, or intuition, is built through practice, through building greater sensitivity and a deeper relationship to the land and to plant and fungi ancestors.
We believe in our interdependence. Reciprocity connects us in relationships of care and responsibility to each other. The mere act of giving and acting out of abundance, trustful that that which has been given will circulate back to you, keeps us in webs of reciprocity- of mutual, collaborative flourishing.