PINE ISLAND, Fla. – A little over four years ago, members of the Twelve Tribes found a beautiful tract of land in Southwest Florida. It had a mango grove. Mangoes don’t grow just anywhere in Florida. Pine Island is next to the Gulf of Mexico; the soil is sandy and it is conducive to producing mangoes. The farm is called Gatherings Grove.

The Twelve Tribes is a community of believers, said Eliezer Carver, who met his wife in that community 40 years ago. They have communities and farms all over the world.

“We live like a community like the book of Acts (Acts of the Apostles),” Carver said. “We share our income and our properties. We’re held together by love and forgiveness. That’s what we do here.”

Most of the communities have a cottage industry. The focus of Gatherings Grove is mangoes.

In their farmstand, besides mango jam, freeze-dried mangoes, mango smoothies, and more, they sell olive oil from their farm in Spain, soaps from Vermont, honey from Michigan, tea from Winnipeg and breads made in Florida with spelt flour grown on their New York farm.

“It’s our farming philosophy to be as natural as possible,” said member John Brosseau. “We work to create an environment where young and old can work together and create this harmonious environment.”

The Bailey brothers started the mango grove in the 1930s, Brosseau said. They grew some of the best mangoes around and developed the Bailey’s Mango. The original tree still produces fruit. In the 1990s, Vivian Murray planted the newer section of the grove with varieties from Thailand. More than 800 mango trees grow in the grove with more than 35 varieties.

“So, the mangoes come, they ripen,” Brosseau said. “We harvest them, we cut them up and dry them, we freeze-dry them – that’s something new we’re doing. We have a pulper/finisher that I found on eBay a couple of years ago. It takes a whole mango, and it spits out the seed and the skins, and you get like an applesauce-consistency puree. It is delicious. In the next few months, as we get licensed and certified through the Department of Agriculture, we’d like to take our products and make them available in our restaurants (The Yellow Deli restaurants) around the country.”

There is an appreciation for that, Brosseau said. “People want what is natural and normal and good. They trust that we’re going to give them a nice product.”

But there is more to the farm than mangoes. It produces much of the food for the approximately 25-member community. They milk Nubian dairy goats by hand twice a day for milk and cheese. As a bonus, the goats eat the invasive Brazilian pepper that flourishes there. Free-range chickens supply eggs that are sold in the store. Two donkeys – Raider and Crispy – keep the coyotes away from the other critters. People from Pine Island come just to visit them.

Lemuel (some community members use a last name, some do not) has worked on Twelve Tribes farms in Vermont since 1993 but has come to Florida in recent years for the winter.  He grows produce in raised beds.

“We grow as much of our food as possible. I grow the vegetables that people eat most of the time, lettuce, broccoli, green beans. I like to make it colorful. It’s nice for the salad. I grow some peppers and tomatoes, although I still haven’t learned how to grow tomatoes in Florida.

“In Vermont, we grow the same things but a lot more of it. We grow a lot of storage crops, beets, onions, garlic, things you can distribute over the winter because we have to feed our community. We sell some at the farmstand. If people come in and want something, they come out and talk to the gardener.”

The Twelve Tribes welcomes visitors to all of their farms. For information, visit www.gatheringsgrove.com and www.twelvetribes.org.