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Food From Around the World, Homegrown in New York

Efrain Estrada, 74, who grew up on a farm in Puerto Rico, is one of dozens of urban farmers in a community garden in the South Bronx.Credit...Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times

Efrain Estrada grows so many peppers, eggplants, okra and squash that he sends the extras to his relatives in Puerto Rico.

Though Mr. Estrada calls himself a farmer, his bounty sprouts from the unlikeliest of settings: a patch of green wedged among the bodegas and public housing projects of the South Bronx. There, in a community garden where Mr. Estrada is one of dozens of urban farmers, he fills a box of soil no larger than a child’s sandbox with the things he used to grow with his father on a farm in Puerto Rico.

“If I knew what I know now, I would have helped my father a lot more,” said Mr. Estrada, 74, a retired cook. “There would have been more food.”

Mr. Estrada is able to carry on his family’s agrarian tradition in a teeming metropolis as a result of New York City’s thriving network of community gardens, which is being expanded at a time when an onslaught of development has made these public green spaces more valuable than ever. The community gardens are a refuge for immigrants and those without farms or country houses to escape to in the summer as well as a homegrown source of fruits and vegetables in food deserts like the South Bronx.

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A pepper plant at the United We Stand Community Garden.Credit...Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times

This summer, the Parks Department’s GreenThumb program — the nation’s largest community garden program — has grown to 553 gardens, up from 501 in 2009. Most of the gardens sit on city-owned or other public property, and are maintained by community groups and a dedicated corps of 20,000 volunteer gardeners.

In many neighborhoods, community gardens have fiercely loyal protectors who have mobilized in recent years as the city has targeted gardens in Harlem and elsewhere as sites for affordable housing, and private developers have also eyed them.

Bill LoSasso, the director of GreenThumb, said the program had increased its efforts to create more community gardens across the city, especially in largely immigrant communities where many newcomers have roots in agricultural areas. Its budget has increased to $2.9 million annually from $720,000 three years ago, and its staff has nearly doubled to 35 people, who provide training and support and free materials like plants, shovels and wheelbarrows.

“Sometimes when you arrive in a new place, you don’t have a network you can tap into for support,” Mr. LoSasso said. “By joining a community garden, you’re joining a network of neighbors who are coming from diverse backgrounds who can help new members of their community to get settled.”

About 3.2 million New Yorkers, or 38 percent of the city’s population of 8.5 million, were born in other countries, according to an analysis of census data by Queens College. About half of those immigrants came from the Caribbean, Central America and South America.

Queens had the largest number of foreign-born residents, with 1.1 million, followed by Brooklyn with 992,255 and the Bronx with 514,360.

The gardeners at the New Roots Community Farm in the Bronx hail from Guyana, the Dominican Republic, the Central African Republic, Afghanistan, Gambia, Myanmar and the Ivory Coast, among many other places. The garden was started in 2012 by the International Rescue Committee, a refugee services organization, and Bronx Green-Up, an outreach program of the New York Botanical Garden.

Ursula Chanse, the director of Bronx Green-Up, said that in the last decade, her program had increasingly worked with gardeners from the Caribbean, Mexico, Central America and Africa who have settled in the Bronx. “Community gardens reflect the neighborhoods and local demographics,” she said.

In the City Line neighborhood of Brooklyn, Bangladeshi immigrants tend a community garden with spinach, winged beans, long beans and bitter melon gourds. The garden was opened in 2014 after a four-year effort by a local group, Bangladeshi American Community Development and Youth Services, to take over a trash-strewn lot.

Samiha Huda, the group’s executive director, said that home gardening was part of daily life in Bangladesh. Ms. Huda, who lived in the city of Dhaka before moving to New York in 2009, used to grow mangos, lychees, spinach and beans on the roof of her apartment building there.

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Jose Ramos, 89, is a retired maintenance worker from Puerto Rico who works in a community garden every day in the summer.Credit...Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times

Now she can go to the community garden, where the pickings are free for the taking and there are plans for henna painting and story time. “This garden is open for everyone,” Ms. Huda said. “We never talk of having a fence, ever.”

The United We Stand Community Garden where Mr. Estrada plants was started in the 1990s by Bronx residents and rebuilt and expanded last year by GrowNYC, the organization that runs the city’s Greenmarkets. It has built 100 community gardens since 1975, including 43 since 2013.

“There is nothing more beautiful, and quintessentially New York, than people from all over the world working together to build a better community,” said Marcel Van Ooyen, its president.

The 15,000-square-foot garden is divided into 51 numbered boxes that are assigned to individual gardeners to plant what they fancy. “This is my second home,” said Jose Ramos, 89, a retired maintenance worker from Puerto Rico who works in the garden every day in the summer.

Alex Gonzalez, 44, a deli worker from Mexico, has a box full of tomatoes, green beans, jalapeño peppers and papalo, a cilantrolike herb used in Mexican dishes. He would grow more, if he had more space. His wife and his brother also have boxes. “This is fresh,” he said. “I like to eat this way.”

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Alex Gonzalez, 44, a deli worker from Mexico, has a box full of vegetables used in Mexican dishes. He said he would grow more, if he had more space.Credit...Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times

In the next box over, Mr. Estrada watered slight green plants that will bear sweet peppers called aji dulce for his wife’s homemade sofrito sauce. She makes enough to freeze for the cold months. “It’s very expensive to buy,” he said.

Mr. Estrada said he hated working on the family farm in Puerto Rico because he was given no choice. His father used to tell him that they were planting for the rainy days.

“When you have no money, you go to the farm and grab something and then we have lunch,” he said. “It was a necessity.”

But years later when his Bronx neighbors started cleaning up a junkyard to turn into a community garden, he did not hesitate to pitch in.

“I said, ‘This corner is going to be my garden,’” he recalled. “Now I’m going to make a garden on my own with what my father taught me. I had farming in my blood.”

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 14 of the New York edition with the headline: From Around the World, Homegrown in New York. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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