The new company specializes in seeds that make cultural connections to immigrants, adventurous eaters, and anyone interested in preserving biodiversity and culinary history.

Beneath the clatter of the elevated subway in the Brooklyn neighborhood of East New York is a garden full of vegetables you won’t find on local grocery stores shelves, including a healthy plot of tall callaloo.

Callaloo is an important part of Caribbean cuisine. The green, leafy plant, also called amaranth, is often steamed with onion, tomatoes, and garlic. Easy to grow and full of iron, it’s difficult to find in the United States, even in East New York, where there’s a large Caribbean population.

Marlene Wilks’ solution is to grow her own. She first brought callaloo seeds in the early 1990s from Jamaica, where she grew up and where her mother is a farmer, because growing the plant was the only way she could get it. She calls it “the perfect green.”