Every day in the summer, Victor Khan, 72, of Norwood hobbles to his kitchen window, and carefully climbs onto the roof of the Sing Fei Chinese Restaurant from his fire escape overlooking Putnam Place and East Gun Hill Road to tend to his garden.

An automobile accident at age 15 partially disabled Khan, making him unable to move his hip and causing one of his legs to be an inch and a half shorter than the other. Using a chair to help boost himself out of the window makes it a little easier to get outside, but not much. The struggle leads to a burgeoning garden, a hobby he took up after retiring from Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital on West 168th Street, where he was a nursing attendant.

On the right hand side of the roof facing the street, tomato and gourd plants grow tall. Next to them in containers and repurposed trash cans are four potato plants, while hot peppers grow from a pot nearby. Sitting on the ledge of the store roof, a fresh jasmine plant fills the air with a sweet scent.

Khan’s hope is to relocate his miniature farm to the roof of his apartment building by next summer, where his plants will get more sunlight and he will have more space to continue growing fresh vegetables for himself and his neighbors. He first needs permission from the new landlord.

“I’ve lived in this apartment since 2003,” Khan said. “Because of my age I don’t do much, just watch TV. And then one day I thought, you know, since I’m interested in growing vegetables, why don’t I put [some] outside. I went to the old landlord. His name is John. So I said, ‘I want to grow tomatoes.’ He said, ‘where?’ I said the rooftop on the top of your stores [outside my window], and he said ‘Really? So give me some tomatoes,’ and that was it.”

While Khan has been living in the Bronx since 1981, his passion for farming flourished when he was a child in Pakistan. Though he was born and raised in the city of Peshawar, his mother’s side of the family resided in the farm village, Sahiwal. “Every year at Christmas time and summer vacation, from school we would go to the village. And we would participate in them cutting the weeds because in the summertime you cut the weeds and harvest things. I was there growing up, so I just had this interest in farming,” he explained.

The plants in the garden are tended to carefully, and Khan is particular about what he uses to grow them. He mixes his own soil, adding five types of organic fertilizer, bone meal, blood meal and Epsom salt to store-bought dirt. Some of the gourd seeds used are purchased from India, and rodent traps guard the vegetables from hungry intruders. Khan mostly gets help from his son and a neighbor he recently met, Demetrius McCordian.

While farming is simply a hobby for Khan, McCordian believes Khan is doing important work that the community could get involved with. “For me, it kind of goes back to the roots of the Bronx as kind of a farming environment,” McCordian said. “But even more so in neighborhoods like this, that are essentially a food desert and have very limited healthy food options, creating your own produce and being able to consume it is important.”

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Welcome to the Norwood News, a bi-weekly community newspaper that primarily serves the northwest Bronx communities of Norwood, Bedford Park, Fordham and University Heights. Through our Breaking Bronx blog, we focus on news and information for those neighborhoods, but aim to cover as much Bronx-related news as possible. Founded in 1988 by Mosholu Preservation Corporation, a not-for-profit affiliate of Montefiore Medical Center, the Norwood News began as a monthly and grew to a bi-weekly in 1994. In September 2003 the paper expanded to cover University Heights and now covers all the neighborhoods of Community District 7. The Norwood News exists to foster communication among citizens and organizations and to be a tool for neighborhood development efforts. The Norwood News runs the Bronx Youth Journalism Heard, a journalism training program for Bronx high school students. As you navigate this website, please let us know if you discover any glitches or if you have any suggestions. We’d love to hear from you. You can send e-mails to norwoodnews@norwoodnews.org or call us anytime (718) 324-4998.