Immigrants living in the United States inevitably miss a piece of home that can’t be found abroad. For many, that void is at the grocery store — because some crops aren’t grown here.
A University of Minnesota program is working to change that.
Hennepin County master gardener Chidi Chidozie recently showed off his craft and passion at the living garden exhibit at the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum in Chaska, Minn.
Chidozie is one of three immigrant gardeners growing non-native plants at the “Transplanting Traditions” exhibit.
Chidozie grew up gardening with his father in Nigeria and has sustained that passion when he immigrated to the U.S. in the 1970s. The now-retired financial systems analyst explains each plant in his small exhibit garden. He’s proud of the fluted pumpkins, amaranth and one new plant in particular.
“That’s the curry, Nigerian curry … this plant might be one or two in the whole state of Minnesota that you are going to see,” he said. “This is the first year we're introducing it. In fact, there’s none at the university garden. I decided to try it out here.”
The “university garden” he’s referring to a field at the University of Minnesota’s Community Plant Breeding Team, part of the school’s Plant Breeding Center. It’s an all-volunteer initiative to grow African vegetables in Minnesota.
On the U’s St. Paul campus, hidden away beyond the buildings and among the green landscape, is a field full of sprouting African leafy vegetables such as Ethiopian mustard, fluted pumpkin and African basil.
The center’s director Rex Bernardo said he got the idea to breed vegetables from foreign lands through a 2016 MPR News article.
The story “talked about immigrants in the Twin Cities going to farmers markets and buying African produce grown by Hmong farmers,” he said.
The Minneapolis farmers market, according to the article, brought in people from as far away as Texas and New York to find produce from their home countries.
“I’m thinking, ‘Oh, my goodness, they are driving these long distances to buy fresh produce,’” Bernardo said.
The premise stayed with him for years. When the Plant Breeding Center opened in 2021, he said he believed such an initiative would meet the center’s mission through collaboration, continuing education and community building.
Bernardo said he understands why people would travel hours to find food from their native countries.
“As an immigrant myself, I can relate to that, because food, the foods you grew up with, are a huge draw,” he said. “I could see myself going to long distances, figuratively and literally, just to get these foods that I like.”
Chidozie said he sees that draw when he’s inspiring others to garden.
“In order to get them to garden, you have to provide them with cultural relevant plant,” he said.
For example, “if you tell somebody from Kenya to plant tomato and green pepper, they tell you, ‘Oh, I can go to the farmers market and buy it very cheap. So why do I need to garden?’” Chidozie said.
But when he urges the person to grow “a vegetable that he cannot find at the farmers market or at Cub … All of a sudden, his interest picks up. He wants to garden,” Chidozie explained.
When he was in the early stages of setting up the Community Plant Breeding Team, Bernardo said he reached out to post-graduate students to gauge their interest. He said they were eager for hands on learning. Getting community members to buy in, however, was another story.
“Lo and behold, we found, well, we needed to first establish good relationships with the people to whom these plants are important,” Bernardo said. “Because we could do things on our own, but what if what we’re doing isn’t relevant, then we’re not doing a good service.”
Lauren Docherty is a PhD student and has been a volunteer on the project since 2023.
“It’s been a gradual process of building community relationships,” she said.
Chidozie joined the project in 2022 as part of their effort to build community gardeners, she said.
“And he’s been really the biggest community connection that we’ve had. And then he has introduced us to many other people that are also interested in this project,” Docherty said.
Bernardo wholeheartedly agreed.
“He has been a most valuable help to us in all of the work that we are doing,” he said. “He has a wealth of knowledge regarding these Indigenous species. He’s an immigrant from Africa, so these are species near and dear to him.”
Bernardo and the student volunteers learned from the community gardeners early on, he said.
For example, he said, the first taste tests Bernardo and the students did was of the Ethiopian mustard, a cabbage-like vegetable in the same family as collard greens and kale. They were tasting them raw.
“We found, you know what, those to whom Ethiopian mustard is important, they don’t eat it raw. They don’t eat it as a salad, like we do lettuce here, but it’s actually cooked.”
Now the team harvests and weeds together, one day a week. The team will meet yearly for a combination catered meal/potluck where some immigrants bring dishes prepared with the African leafy vegetables.
Chidozie is the community program’s biggest fan and calls it a success.
“I’m biased. I will rate it 100 percent because we have gotten a lot of people into gardening,” he said. “We have educated a lot of people about some of the African vegetables. We have proven that just because the crop is from Africa doesn’t mean it won’t grow in Minnesota.”
He said the goal is to turn the field into a global garden with plants from Asia and Latin America.