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Try the Bronx Hot Sauce Supporting Community Gardens

Courtesy Aidan Grant via Small Axe Peppers.

This project has now grown nationwide, with 75 gardens participating in 15 cities.

By Max Watman
Yahoo News
January 12, 2021

Excerpt:

Max Watman
Tue, January 12, 2021, 2:05 AM PST

John Crotty was looking for a building in the Bronx for his affordable housing development organization when by chance he spotted an empty lot with southern exposure. In a flash, he saw his future.

“What’s going on with that space over there?” Crotty thought to himself. He immediately knew the trash strewn plot was perfect for a community garden. His next thought was about what they could possibly grow there. His mind jumped to growing peppers and making hot sauce out of them, because “it was the only thing we could grow in a confined space and make more of an end product. One hundred pounds of peppers becomes 500 pounds of hot sauce. All other fresh produce for commercial purposes goes the other way—you grow 100 pounds to sell 75.”

So Crotty contacted his childhood friend King Phojanakong, chef and owner of the Lower East Side’s Kuma Inn, and asked him to develop some sauces, which ultimately became the Small Axe Peppers line. “I told him what I wanted to do and asked him to be the chef.” Crotty adds, kidding, “I’m sure he regrets it.”

For Crotty, the fact that the sauces are delicious are almost an ancillary benefit. “The idea was to help gardens and make a commercially scalable product.”

While his plot was a good start he needed more peppers for a commercially successful line of hot sauces. So, “I went to GrowNYC. They do a fair amount of urban gardening things and run all the Greenmarkets in the city.” It helped that the head of that organization had worked with the City Council, back when Crotty was employed in the office of then mayor Michal Bloomberg. “After they got done laughing at me, they were helpful.” In its first year, Small Axe Peppers and GrowNYC donated pepper seedlings to five community gardens around the Bronx.

Read the complete article here.