In 2019, Garden City Harvest began a partnership with Soft Landing Missoula, a non-profit that supports immigrant and refugee resettlement in our community. This partnership began as one family gardening at one of our community garden sites. It has since grown to eleven families gardening across five different gardens. In addition, our River Road Neighborhood Farm has donated thousands of pounds of produce to Soft Landing for distribution to clients the past three years.

A close up of some lenga lenga seedlings in a gardener’s plot.

Our partnership helps families connect to their homeland through growing foods that are familiar, comforting, and may also carry cultural and/or medicinal value. One of the most commonly grown crops amongst the Congolese gardeners is a called Lenga Lenga: a species of Amaranth grown across Eastern and Central Africa. It is in the same family as pigweed and has consequently caused some confusion at the gardens, because many gardeners assume the plots are overrun by weeds!

Lenga lenga is used similarly to other leafy greens like spinach, chard, or collards. It is typically cooked down and used in stew like dishes or eaten as a side with fish or other meat.

When it flowers and goes to seed, lenga lenga is very recognizable as an amaranth. Letting the plants go to seed is extremely important for the gardeners continued success year after year, as the seeds are not available for purchase in the U.S.

There are multiple species of lenga lenga and I could not find evidence of anyone officially documenting them all. From talking with one of our gardeners who grows the plant, I learned that there was both a red and green variety that was grown commonly where she was from in Africa. She only grows the green one here. She told me that a friend brought the seeds over, and now they save seeds from year to year since the seeds for this variety cannot be found in the United States. Amaranth has tiny seeds and is very good at reseeding itself on its own.

What might appear as a passerby as a plot full of weeds is actually a plot of germinating lenga lenga! (with some weeds mixed in there, of course.)

To read more about the partnership between Garden City Harvest and Soft Landing Missoula, click here!