LISBON – She’s stooped over, harvesting leafy green pea tendrils for the Lewiston Farmers Market, a floor-length dress tucked in the top of brown pants. Big gold earrings bob on either ear.

Her brown galoshes troop through dusty rows of peas, tomatoes, corn, pumpkins and beets.

“Welcome to my farm,” Hawa Ibrahim says, grinning widely.

Ibrahim’s farm is a one-acre patch at Packard-Littlefield Farm; hers is the largest plot in a new Americans-as-farmers program. Coastal Enterprises Inc. leases the land from Bob and Ella Mae Packard.

Bob Packard has been watching their progress.

“They’ve made phenomenal improvements from last year to this year,” he said.

Next spring, he’ll offer a little advice on tractors. The immigrants use just a corner of the rolling 199 acres. The Packards, retired Connecticut teachers, grow hay, corn and sunflowers on most of the rest of the longtime family farm.

“What you see, you’ll always see,” Packard said. “We could have been multi-millionaires. It’s not important to us.”

The Packard-Littlefield Farm was the first in Androscoggin County protected with Land for Maine’s Future money – public money. The program turns 20 this year. Paired with local groups and sometimes federal funds, LMF has helped buy 197,460 acres outright and bought development rights on another 247,463 acres, like Packard’s.

It’s kept thousands of acres open to public recreation – hunting, boating, fishing, hiking – and kept homes off picturesque, irreplaceable real estate.

The Packards swapped the right to subdivide and sell lucrative house lots for $256,000, less than the appraised value of the easement. Some of the money’s gone toward renovations of their home and barn.

“No regrets,” said Packard. Just this week, an artist stopped by and asked permission to paint his sunflowers.

Welcoming the new CEI project to the property made sense, he said. He taught French and Spanish for 35 years and traveled extensively in Central and South America.

“It’s a good match,” said Amy Carrington, the New American Sustainable Agriculture Project’s director. “He’s scaling down his vegetable production, we’re scaling up.”

The project used four acres last year, six this year. It’ll grow to 11 next year when the 20 farmers will be joined by another 20 that had been working land in Scarborough. The project’s being condensed to one site in Maine, the Packard’s.

Most participants are African, and most women. There are a lot of differences farming here, said John Yanga, outreach and teaching coordinator, originally from Sudan.

You’ve got to plant in neat rows. The season’s much shorter. Vegetables have different names.

“I was given some seeds (marked ‘purslane’). I planted them, ‘Oh, it’s rigla!'” Yanga said. He recognized the greens from back home.

Carrington estimated the farmers will harvest thousands of pounds of vegetables. They sell them at markets, to restaurants and Bates College, and as part of a delivery program where customers pre-order shares.

Farmers keep 100 percent of sales and bring extra vegetables home.

Many people, “they just buy to test,” Yanga said. They’ve never heard of purslane or rigla.

Ibrahim farmed back home in Somalia, since she was little, 7 or 8, when her parents got her a kid-sized hoe. She moved to Lewiston in 2005.

Carrington said some shy women prefer to sell to wholesalers for a little less, rather than deal with the public. Not Ibrahim. She’s a saleswoman.

Taking a quick break, Ibrahim popped a leafy green shoot in her mouth and made a sort of mmm, good face.

“Very nice pea tendrils,” she said.