10 Gardening Successes, From a Backyard Vegetable Harvest and Homemade Garlic Soup to a Wildflower Garden Where Rescued Dogs Found Happiness

My dog got sick last month. Vet said it was soil poisoning. So I dug up the corner he always ate from. 8 inches down I found a sealed container. I called the police. Next day, the officer said, “Don’t speak to your neighbor until we get there. She knows we’re coming. I called her myself last night. She’s 82 and she hasn’t slept, so I’d like to be standing there when you two talk.”

Mrs. Hollis was already on her porch in a cardigan. The container was a rusted steel drum with her husband’s orchard name on the lid. The bottom had rusted through, and the vet said that’s what had been leaking into the soil my dog kept eating. My house sits on what used to be the back half of his apple orchard. After the old orchard spray got banned, he hid what was left instead of hauling it off, then sold the lot. She knew it was “somewhere by the old apple stump,” but never where. She’d watched my dog dig in that corner for weeks and was too scared I’d sue to say anything.

I told her I was just glad the dog was okay. A crew hauled out the drum and a few truckloads of dirt, and the county covered it. She tried to pay my vet bill, so I told her to bake instead. She’s up to six pies. Last weekend we put raised beds in that corner and planted a graft from her husband’s last apple tree. My dog has his own dig box now and he still tries the vegetable bed first.

• My wife ran the garden for twenty years. This summer I took over and did it badly. Garlic the size of baseball bats, tomatoes with some disease I can’t pronounce, one lonely pumpkin. Part of that was Gus, the lab mix we got in April, who “helped” by hiding every tool I own. I found the trowel in September, plus two gloves and a spatula that’s been missing since 2019. I made soup from the garlic, and it tasted fine. Nobody has to know how. My wife says she’s taking the garden back next year. I told her Gus and I would discuss it.

• Behind our shelter there’s a strip of gravel, maybe 40 feet long, where we used to walk the dogs. Last fall 2 volunteers dug it up on Saturday mornings and scattered wildflower seed. By June the dogs who hated leash walks were stopping at the edge of it and sniffing for a full minute before going in. Mabel, a beagle mix who hadn’t wagged her tail in six weeks, spent an entire afternoon lying in the poppies. A family took her home that weekend and asked more about the flowers than the dog. We gave them a seed packet.

• I went to this animal shelter where nobody wanted Ernie. 12 years old, gray muzzle, one ear that stays folded, 9 months at the shelter. I took him home in October last year and planted garlic the same weekend, because everybody says you plant garlic in October and I needed to be told to do something. He lay in the dirt next to the bed the entire afternoon like he’d been waiting for it. In March the garlic came up and he lay next to it again. The vet says he’s got more time than she expected. I told her it was the garlic.

• My mom’s pit mix Waffles figured out which cherry tomatoes are ripe. Nobody taught him. he walks the row, plucks the red ones off the vine with his front teeth, and carries them to the back door like a cat with a bird. My mom found 14 under his bed last week. we ate eight of them. The other six, she says, are his, and we are not allowed to touch them.

• Our greyhound, Dot, hid behind the couch for the first nine weeks. Wouldn’t go past the back step. My wife scattered wildflower seed over the whole back strip in April, mostly because she needed something to do with her hands. By July it was knee-high. One morning I looked out and Dot was in the middle of it, cornflowers up to her chest, nose working like crazy. She has a path through it now. She’s still not great with strangers or the vacuum. But if you call her in for dinner, you have to call twice, because she’s busy.