Power in seeds: Urban gardening gains momentum in pandemic

ON an assemblage of vacant lots and other pockets of unused land in the Bronx, gardeners from low-income neighborhoods have banded together to create over a dozen “farm hubs,” coordinating their community gardens and their harvest.

Several years ago, some discovered that, together, their small gardens could grow enough peppers to mass-produce hot sauce — Bronx Hot Sauce, to be precise, with profits from the sales reinvested in their communities.

During the pandemic, the farm hubs of the Bronx have again proved their might, producing health-boosting crops like garlic, kale and collard greens.

“The trick is, how can we learn from the pandemic so that we become genuinely resilient?” says Raymond Figueroa-Reyes, president of the New York City Community Garden Coalition.

“When the pandemic hit, urban farming went into hyper-productivity mode. People saw that the (food) donations coming in were are not adequate in terms of quantity or quality, and