12 Fall Gardening Season Moments Worth Remembering, From Bedsheets Protecting Green Tomatoes at 28°F, to a Calm Bee Swarm Rescue

I planted wildflowers on my late wife’s memorial because she loved them. I had no idea my stepdaughter was allergic until she yelled, “You tried to split us up when Mom was alive, and you’re still doing it! I wish she’d never met you!” I was devastated. I decided to dig up the flowers, so yesterday I went to her memorial with a shovel. But when I got there, my stepdaughter was standing beside it wearing a mask, watering the flowers. She looked at me and started crying. “I’m sorry. I’ve been so angry since Mom passed that I blamed you for everything. I know she loved these flowers, and I know you planted them because you loved her, too.” Then she asked me to leave them there. I dropped the shovel and hugged her. We both cried beside the memorial, and for the first time in years, I felt like we might actually become a family.

Two Octobers ago the forecast dropped to 28°F with less than a day’s warning. I work nights at the hospital, so I slept through the afternoon, woke up late, and rushed out for my 7 p.m. shift without checking the weather. I had about forty green tomatoes still on the vines, mostly Cherokee Purples in the side yard, and by the time a coworker mentioned the freeze around midnight, there was nothing I could do. When I pulled in the next morning, my neighbor Don, a retired mail carrier I’d only ever waved at, was out there pulling old bedsheets off my plants. He’d noticed my car was gone all evening, so he draped sheets over the tomato cages and the fence and weighed the edges down with bricks, using sheets instead of plastic because plastic touching the leaves passes the cold straight through.
The tops of the tallest plants still got bitten, but most of the fruit underneath was fine. About half of it ripened on the counter in paper bags, and the rest became green tomato relish. I gave him two jars, and he gave me back a jar of his wife’s pickled beets, which I did not ask for and do not like, but we still swap every fall.

After my neighbor Ruth had hip surgery, she couldn’t kneel anymore, and her beds were a mess of bindweed by June. I’m not handy, but I built her a raised bed out of cedar 2×10s over two weekends, mostly by watching YouTube and messing up the corners twice. I put it on a patch of lawn instead of her old beds, since bindweed roots go down several feet, and laid cardboard underneath to smother the grass. To save on soil, I filled the bottom third with old branches and rotted logs, then topped it with a roughly 60/40 mix of topsoil and compost from my own pile. My big mistake was stacking the boards four high, about 37 inches, because I measured it against myself, and Ruth, who is five-foot-one, pointed that out within ten seconds. Fixing it meant shoveling everything onto a tarp, removing the top board to bring it down to about 28 inches, and refilling it, which ate my entire next Saturday. Since it was late June by then, she stuck with basil, marigolds, and two Sungold transplants from the garden center, and they still produced into September. If you’re building one for an older relative, measure from their hip, not yours.

Last May a swarm of honeybees landed on the lilac by my front door, and I panicked because I’d always assumed I was allergic. When I was eight, a sting on my foot swelled all the way up to my ankle, and my parents treated me as allergic from then on without ever getting me tested. I called our county beekeepers association, which I only knew about because a friend said most areas keep a swarm-removal list.
A woman named Denise showed up within an hour, and I watched from the living room window while she shook the cluster into a cardboard nuc box. Afterward she knocked on the door and explained that swarming bees are usually calm because they’re full of honey and have no hive to defend yet. When I told her why I’d stayed inside, she said a swollen foot sounded more like a large local reaction and suggested I get tested, and the allergist’s skin test confirmed it. She texted me a photo of the swarm in its new hive a week later, and since then I’ve replaced a strip of lawn along the fence with catmint, anise hyssop, and bee balm. I still flinch when one flies close, but I’m working on it.