There is a Facebook group called Indian Vegetable Garden that keeps rejecting my application to join. To enter the group, you are required to answer the question, “Do you eat Indian vegetables? If you’ve never tasted ridge gourd, bottle gourd, drumstick, etc., this group will be boring and not useful for you …” 

I apply again. While my membership is pending, I fervently post in Facebook’s maze of user-run and highly moderated groups for amateur gardeners in Long Island and suburban Queens begging to interview anyone who grows the vegetable karela: Long Island Native Plant Gardening Group; Native Plant Exchange – Long Island (removed my post); Long Island Plant Sales, Trades, and Discussions (my post instead sparked a dialogue about soursop connections on the Island); ReWild Long Island; and Ozone Park Residents Block Association (a commenter replied to me: “Might be an undercover city inspector. You mlght [sic] need a license to garden, everything has to pass inspection, soil must be tested. It’s a trap. I wouldn’t put it past this city”).

Through these groups, although neither of us can remember which one exactly, I find Nilima Aunty, the Alpha Brown Gardener of Suffolk County. Nilima moderates a WhatsApp group of Indian and Guyanese gardeners in Long Island who exchange seedlings (like lemongrass and Indian pumpkin, which was too demanding last year for her to grow) and gripes (like about how to get rabbits and chipmunks to stop eating and digging up marigolds). The first thing Nilima does when she wakes up in the morning is check in on “mom’s new babies” (Nilima also has a real human daughter my age). Her babies, which she started growing “serially” as a tribute to her father, a gardener who passed away in 2020, are tinda, lauki, mirchi, Indian tomatoes, bindi, and, of course, karela. 

I start to ask Nilima, originally from Uttar Pradesh in India, where she gets her seeds from, and she diverts the conversation to the Guyanese mandir near her home. The people at the Guyanese temple are “like family” to her, and if she’s feeling lazy, she buys ripe karela plants from a Guyanese seller in Queens. 

I wonder why my grandfather has never grown Indian produce (except shahtoot), instead growing apples, tomatoes, raspberries, cucumbers, spicy peppers (for my grandma), basil, cilantro, and a fig tree that he’s been working on for five years but has yet to see blossom.

Ecologists and conservation biologists love it when suburban single-family homeowners atone for sins of Long Islanders past by seeding their grassy front lawns with “native plants” like swampy milkweed that creates habitats for monarch butterflies, stringy switchgrass that feeds birds in the winter and manages stormwater flooding, and cinnamon ferns with swirling fiddlehead fronds that pop up to say hi in summer without need for fertilizers and whirring weekly landscaping. 

Despite (or perhaps because of) vast expanses of green status symbol-y monocrops, Long Island is crawling with “invasive species”: plants that arrived through irresponsible agriculture or pre-TSA suitcase-smuggling or colonization or by accident. So, citizen scientists and neighborhood do-gooders take action: trapping lanternflies hanging out on trees in plastic water bottles before they help molds grow, or working with groups like the Long Island Sound Study to knife-cut phragmites from the shore before they outcompete the rest of the salt marsh. 

Too bad I’m not a scientist (and certainly not a neighborhood do-gooder), so I’ve been spending all my time tending to a non-native plant whose climbing vines will hopefully outcompete other plants for light, nutrients, water, and attention in my kitchen. When they get big enough, I’ll plant them in my grandfather’s backyard garden.

Like Nilima Aunty, I’m growing karela (also known as bitter melon, bitter gourd, foo gwa, cerassee, khổ-qua, ampalaya, and balsamina). Karela is an acquired taste (that I’m not entirely sure I’ve acquired): bitter (obviously) and slimy and ferric and bumpy and uncomfortably tender and only tolerable when masked by dahi and achaar and thick, buttery roti. 

Right before my alarm goes off every morning, I get a new notification from my most active WhatsApp group chat (Patel Brothers Hicksville), sharing the fresh produce deals of the day from the only (probably) supermarket chain in the U.S. to have a chai machine by the register: sitafal and amla on Wednesday, toovar and jaggery on Saturday, and karela this morning. Even when they’re half off, I don’t think anyone ever pounces on the karela. Despite hesitation by South Asians (and beyond—Filipina food writer Abi Balingit tells me that she has “only terrible memories of this food”), community gardens across New York seem to have unilaterally decided that karela is the preferred produce of The Diaspora (or at least a hook to engage South Asian/Indo-Caribbean growers). Red Hook Initiative and Truelove Seeds sell their seeds, Cooper Street proclaims that the neighborhood’s growing Bangladeshi community is growing them, and East New York Farms has even been experimenting with shading at different intervals to best accommodate subtropical veggies “if a plant from Jamaica moves to the City that Never Sleeps.” Why?

Unlike some ethnic produce (a term I obviously use with hesitation) like okra or bok choy, karela hasn’t made its way into the American gustatory supermarket mainstream. Karela is a staple of not just Punjabi regional cuisine, but also broader South Asian, Indo-Caribbean, Chinese, and Southeast Asian cooking (“Alamat ng Ampalaya” is a cautionary Filipino folk tale about how vanity and jealousy turned a once-beautiful vegetable bumpy and bitter). 

In a 2001 New York Times article about karela and other produce sold in Queens, the reporter noted that a twenty-two-year-old studying ethnobotany at Vassar College found that “what goes into the stomachs of many of the newest New Yorkers may seem exotic—at times even revolting—to the city’s more tenured residents.” You might be horrified, but many Punjabis, too, not so secretly feel the same way about karela: forced by their moms to drink its over-steeped bitter tea for dubious Ayurvedic benefits. You can’t get karela at Key Foods, but if you live in New York City, you can find karela in most Asian produce stores—Chinese grocery stores off the N or in seed packets on the stretch between the 7 train and Queens Botanical Garden in Flushing or in teeny crowded Bangladeshi corner stores near the B in Flatbush or in massive institutional Indian supermarkets off the F in Jackson Heights. 

A few months ago, right by the LIRR stop in Flushing, two vendors were selling “Indian Bitter Gourd” plants, just starting to sprout. As I pulled out three dollars to pay, I asked if they have a lot of customers for this variety of bitter melon. “Tons!” shouted the shop owner, pruning flowers halfway down the block.

When I ask my mom (daughter of a Bahawalpuri Partition refugee who raised me on daal chawal with vadiya and shrimp curry and puri with chole) about her favorite foods growing up, her answer is always cold SpaghettiOs out of the can. Or, as Masi chimes in, frozen corn, fish sticks, Campbell’s soup (also out of the can), spaghetti with sausages, grits, pancakes, shake n’ bake chicken, frozen chicken pot pies, creamed spinach (from the bag, not the can). My grandparents moved to the East Coast (first Boston, then Dover, then Long Island), before the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, so there weren’t any stores that sold Indian groceries. When they lived in Dover, Delaware, they’d drive to Kalustyan’s in Midtown Manhattan, which sold mostly Armenian and Turkish groceries. Kalustyan’s wouldn’t introduce branded chutneys and mango achaar until the late seventies, post waves of Indian immigration (slightly modifying slash supplementing my grandmother’s memory with a Wikipedia timeline). 

So, besides SpaghettiOs, she’d make atta by mixing white and wheat flour, alchemizing yogurt with milk and lemon, and rajma out of canned kidney and pinto beans, while begging relatives visiting from India to smuggle dried vadiya in their suitcases when they visited for weeks or months at a time. I asked my grandma where on Long Island she got her karela forty years before Apna Bazar and Usha Foods opened outposts in Floral Park (on the Long Island-Queens border) or Hicksville (right next to Levittown) or before the South Asian mini enclaves started growing throughout the Island—which are only really acknowledged when the State Assembly wants votes so they try and fail to make Eid or Diwali a statewide holiday. Sixty years later, Long Island has become the capital of Punjab (the 2024 Cricket World Cup was sold out in Nassau County’s Eisenhower Park, which earlier this year hosted a 300-person rally in support of a free Palestine and a 5,000-person rally in support of Zionism). 

My grandmother can’t remember where she found karela, but maybe I can find out.

When I show up at the Crossroads Farm, a 102-year-old organic farmstand and five-acre plot in Malverne (a middle-class, white neighborhood on Long Island’s South Shore), I don’t expect to find karela. Instead, the first thing farmers Michael D’Angelo and Peter Notarnicola show me is their sap collection methodology. Towards the back of the farm, near the Long Island Rail Road tracks that crisscross through the fallow February grass and brassy mulch spreaders that mechanize manual labor, Norway maples are being tapped for their interstitial fluid. Sap, or sugary tree blood, is removed by inserting a spile past the bark into the sapwood and collecting the liquid via plastic tubes. It doesn’t hurt the tree, and Notarnicola assures me that the spiles they use are designed to be less intrusive and keep debris out. Climate change made it too warm last winter to draw any sap: there was no freeze-and-thaw cycle where the temperature dipped below freezing at night and warmed up during the day. I’d never tried sap before, but we all took a spoonful out of a white bucket.

The farm, which employs D’Angelo and Notarnicola as part of the Nassau Land Trust and is owned by the County, is both a “market garden”—selling beets, eggplants, and celery along the Island as part of the Farmers Market Nutrition Program (a voucher program that helps farm stands subsidize the cost of fresh produce for low-income residents and senior citizens, and accept SNAP/EBT) —and an “educational garden”—inviting grade-school classrooms across the Valley Stream School District to plant seeds in the winter and harvest those lettuce heads at the end of the school year to make salad. 

Once we get back to the greenhouse, Notarnicola lets me look through his color-coded Excel spreadsheet of their crops: radish, kohlrabi, collard greens, okra, Scotch bonnet, and karela. I don’t expect Peter and Michael from Long Island to know what karela is, and I wonder if some brown volunteer from near-ish Floral Park accidentally dropped some seeds from her purse. Instead, it was Notarnicola who planted the karela. He later sends me home with kombucha and a yacón (a South American root vegetable that tastes like a cross between an apple and a potato). 

When I ask why karela was on the ledger, D’Angelo tells me that “your basic American is not our target.” Instead the farm grows affordable produce for people like the Trinidadian UPS driver dropping off a package there who complained that the karela on Liberty Avenue in Richmond Hill was overpriced. Still, it’s a controversial vegetable within the garden, partly because of “weird USDA warnings” about pregnancy and because a volunteer demanded that the farm put caution labels on the plant. Notarnicola took the side of the plant.

Before I leave, D’Angelo tells me that “the Island is constantly changing.” The front orchard grows both mixed apple trees and pear trees: the apples are a Northeast staple, but have been struggling with pests and diseases in Long Island, and the pear trees are recent arrivals from China, but have been blossoming. On the way out we pass by dried bushel gourds (which Indigenous people in Long Island used to grow) that Notarnicola dusts the mold off of (into my hair by accident) and turns into birdhouses. The mold has a positive symbiotic relationship with the fruit, feeding off the moisture, drying it out, and preserving its seeds for generations.

I do some digging into Brooklyn’s East New York (ENY), the community garden capital of New York City, with over sixty active gardens. Like other neighborhoods that suffered redlining and vacancies in the 1960s, neighbors and churches banded together to transform vacant lots into dynamic strategies to address food apartheid. East New York Farms!, run by the 71-year-old United Community Centers, is founded on the pillars of food sovereignty and affordable, culturally relevant crops: migrants from the American South or Caribbean bring with them rich farming knowledge and seeds that they use to plant and harvest bitter melon fruit and leaves, Malabar spinach, Scotch bonnet peppers, Asian eggplants, lemongrass, and more. 

I connect with Alec Chi, a community gardens organizer working at the farm providing technical assistance with trellis netting, seedlings, food justice, and healthy food access to farmers in South Brooklyn. Alec is familiar with karela (although calls it by its Caribbean name, cerasee), having seen it swaddled in plastic wrap at a Japanese market in Sunset Park for $10 a pound or stewed in a stir-fry at a Trinidadian restaurant on the corner near the farm. East New York is not a historically or presently Punjabi neighborhood, but has seen older waves of (Indo-)Caribbean immigrants and newer waves of Bangladeshi immigrants. One neighbor regularly buys thirty pounds of karela from the farm to make an “elixir,” others use its leaves for tea to regulate blood sugar and detox their digestive system, and some make a stir-fry. I like it with butter on white bread.

The Caribbean and Punjab are closer to the equator than New York is, so karela is accustomed to higher humidity, warmer temperatures, and more hours of direct sunlight. I asked Alec how ENY Farms accommodates these non-native plants, and he told me no adaptations are needed in ENY because of the urban heat island effect—deep within cities, where there’s high density and lack of green space, the average temperature is higher than nearby suburbs or neighborhoods with better resources. Seeds also have good memories, adapting to each year’s weather patterns and passing that information on to their children; a year of drought will make pigeon peas more drought-resistant the next year. 

Alec sends me to a Bangladeshi farmer, who I can’t track down, and Owen Taylor, who runs Truelove Seeds: a “seed-saving” organization that helps preserve culturally important plants. Owen partners with ENY Farms to help their farmers preserve ancestral crops (that they’ve brought with them to Brooklyn via plane or boat or on foot) and produce enough seeds for generations. I’m a little lost on the biology here, but Owen says they’re the “midwives” of the plant. Owen worked with a Vietnamese group in Camden, New Jersey, to harvest seeds, and learned that karela is easy to grow, but hard to germinate. At Truelove’s farm, the karela trellis extends over the chicken coop and gives the chicks shade from harsh summer heat.

Deep in a frenzied 3 a.m. anxiety spiral, I email every community garden on Cornell Suffolk Extension’s Long Island database to find out which ones grow karela. None were in Long Island’s South Asian enclaves; most instead are tucked behind churches, absorbed into land trusts (Nassau, Peconic), or run by the Annettes and Eileens and Betties of the island, so I don’t have high expectations for finding brown karela gardeners. A few of my emails bounce back, a few gardens reply they are not yet thawed over from winter or the past few winters, and a few gardens are hard to wrangle. I almost give up hope (maybe community gardens are a city thing?), until an environmental analyst from the Town of Huntington agrees to talk about the municipal Clifford Soergel and Robert M. Kubecka Memorial Gardens (and the town’s new kelp farming initiative, per the chief publicity officer’s request).

Amanda Lerch is waiting for me downstairs at the Huntington Town Hall, finishing up a conversation with two of her gardeners when I enter (frazzled and without an ID), helping a mom pay her annual $15 for a plot, while her daughter bounces between Spanish and English to translate. Amanda did her research before our meeting (“I’ve been preparing all day”), and she hands me fifty pages of detailed maps of the garden plots. For two-and-a-half years, Amanda’s been managing Huntington’s gardens, which include a smaller garden (with twenty-five raised and double-raised beds for gardeners with disabilities) that doesn’t charge for a plot, instead requiring half of each gardener’s yield to be donated to food banks across the island, and a bigger garden (with 375 larger beds). During peak growing months, Amanda inspects all four hundred plots monthly, noting if they’re overrun with weeds, accidentally-on-purpose creeping into their neighbors’ plots, or using invasive plants and chemical fertilizer. 

From a quick glance at the donation log, the garden’s outputs seem standard—organic vegetables like shallots, butternut squash, string beans, celery, peas. But, Long Island is not the City: community gardens aren’t a Park Slope status symbol with waiting lists and surprisingly steep fees and insular communities and locked gates. Huntington’s community gardeners are Caribbean, Chinese, Latinx, Polish, Italian immigrants, growing okra and pumpkins (that enter and win the Long Island Fair) and as Amanda says, “green spiky squash … do you know what that is?” 

Karela isn’t a native plant, but perhaps Amanda doesn’t mind. Long Islanders with more resources live in single-family homes with diggable lawns to plop raised beds, porches to let a trellis dangle and vine, and maintenance requirements from their HOA or inscrutable town village code. Community gardens in Long Island supplement fresh food access for people who are living in apartments or a multifamily shared home with no access to a yard, or renting and don’t have access to a space that lets them grow wandering plants or deep-rooted vegetables.

The community garden, like all collective spaces, is a place of conflict: between growers and pests (mice digging up rooted radishes, mosquitoes, rabbits, voles, cat communities, and higher-level predators like hawks), between language gaps, between mowers hacking weeds in overgrown pathways and gardeners that got overeager and took off more than they should. They are equally spaces of communalism: volunteers who seed dahlias (not to harvest, but to make the garden more pollinated and beautiful for everyone), one Mandarin-speaking volunteer who supplements the Town of Huntington’s language line to help Amanda communicate with new gardeners, or Girl Scouts constructing bee hotels to create nesting chambers for solitary pollinators and owl houses and information kiosks.

I’ve never had much of a green thumb, but I decide to grow karela, Punjabi mirchi (which I get from Kula Nursery, a West Coast seed-saving organization that sells a digital karela cookbook), and cilantro (from the hardware store near the Bayside LIRR stop). Owen of Truelove Seeds has prepared me, but karela seeds look like turtle shells. When you crack them open, they burst with orange and red gel. 

I assuage any guilt from propagating a non-native plant by talking to mainstream ecologists like Dr. Martin A. Schlaepfer (who Zooms me from Switzerland in head-to-toe gorpcore) and tells me that plants, like people, don’t fit into rigid categories like native/non-native/invasive (when does a plant cross the threshold to naturalization?), and that this categorization prevents scientists from realizing quantifiable ecological benefits offered by non-natives (water and air and dirt purification). I later get chai with Neha Savant, an urban ecologist, who has been working within the NYC Parks Department to implement new language around invasives because it “immediately triggers people who have heard that same language used against themselves or their families.”

I think about how sometimes I describe my family as Italian American instead of saying that I’m a second- (or is it third-?) generation Long Islander. I bury the seeds in a quarter inch of Long Island soil, finding watering information from the (probably Hindutva) Times of India. Nothing has sprouted yet.