10 Unforgettable Gardening Moments, From Wildflowers and Bees to Tomatoes and the First Frost

• “Ever get an industrial sized fog machine and decide to run it in the back yard? No? Just me? Spooky season is almost here, folks! 😂 (The fog is mostly water and actually uses very little fog juice.)”

I grow most of my own veggies and gave ripe tomatoes to a struggling single mom down the street. Last week, an ambulance showed up, and she blamed my tomatoes for making her sick. I offered to watch her kid, but she told me to leave. I was so heartbroken I wanted to dig up my whole garden.
Gardening has always been my hobby; I put love into every tomato, wildflower, and flower bed, hoping to attract bees and make my little patch of landscaping beautiful. Even my compost was made with care. With frost season coming, I’d spent weeks protecting every plant.
Anyway, yesterday, men in suits showed up at my door. They were social workers. The doctor had confirmed that her illness was a stomach infection unrelated to my tomatoes, and she’d named me as the person she trusted to care for her child while she was in the hospital.
I didn’t know how to feel. When I visited, she apologized through tears. I told her I understood she was scared and wanted her child safe. I brought groceries and promised to help until she got home. Sometimes, kindness grows in the garden when we least expect it.

The first frost is my favorite morning of the gardening year, and that’s entirely my grandmother’s fault. When I was a kid, she’d wake me up early on the first frosty day so we could walk the garden and see what had survived.
She taught me that kale and collards taste sweeter after a frost because the plant converts starches into sugars to protect itself from freezing. When she moved into assisted living two years ago, she couldn’t garden anymore, and I worried she’d lose that ritual completely.
Her room is on the ground floor, so the facility let me put a planter on the patio outside her window as long as it didn’t block the walkway, and one of the aides offered to water it between my weekend visits. I filled it with Red Russian kale and winter pansies, and when the forecast showed the first frost last November, I called ahead so the front desk would let me in before regular visiting hours.
The leaves closest to the building stayed clear, but the outer ones were frosted white, and we looked at them through the glass together over coffee. The kale got too tough to eat by spring, but that was never really the point.

This is a long shot, but if the person who sent me seeds after a post on this sub in early 2023 is reading, thank you. I’d posted a photo of my pretty sad balcony setup right after my divorce and said gardening was the only hobby keeping me functional.
You offered to send seeds, and I gave you my work address because I wasn’t comfortable sharing my home one, which you were completely fine with. A padded envelope showed up a week later with twelve seed packets, each with a sticky note about how to grow it.
One was a container tomato called Tumbling Tom, which I’d never heard of and which turned out to be perfect for a railing planter. The zinnias and cosmos did better than anything I’d ever bought myself, even though my balcony got only about five hours of sun.
I’ve since moved somewhere with an actual yard and three raised beds, and every January I do a small seed giveaway at my local Buy Nothing group. I deleted that old account and lost our messages with it, and the envelope had no return address, only a Michigan postmark, so this post is the only way I can think of to say thanks.

• “That’s the most unsettling tomato I’ve ever seen..”