12 Gardeners Who Prove Kindness Is the Best Fertilizer for Happiness: a $50 Cucumber, a Vegetable Garden for Shelter Dogs and a Watermelon Named Gerald

Kindness works a lot like compost. It doesn’t look like much at first, but everything around it grows. Even a little greenery can lift a whole neighborhood. In a Penn Medicine study of 541 vacant lots in Philadelphia, people living near lots that were cleaned up and planted with grass and trees reported a 41.5% drop in feelings of melancholy compared with neighbors of lots left untouched.

From a $50 cucumber that was never really about the cucumber to a shelter vegetable garden grown just for the dogs, these stories show how a gardening hobby can grow kindness, and a whole lot of happiness, in the people next door.

• Our son Danny loved zinnias. He used to grow them along our back fence every summer, the brighter the better. He passed away suddenly at 19, in the spring of 2022.
  That first Mother’s Day, I heard car doors at 7 a.m. Six of his friends were standing in our yard with shovels and flats of zinnia seedlings, planting a bed along the fence right where he used to. They’ve come back every Mother’s Day since.
  This year, one of them brought her new baby. The fence in our yard in Peoria, Illinois blooms every summer now, the brightest colors on the street. That’s kindness I’ll never be able to repay.

• My 9 y.o. runs a vegetable stand in our driveway. A neighbor pays $50 for a $2 cucumber every Saturday. Today, I confronted him to say that he doesn’t have to. He said, “I’m not paying for the cucumber,” and pointed at my son’s sign. Under the prices, in crayon, he’d written: “SAVING FOR MOM’S CAR.”
  Our car had stopped running in August. Since then, I’d been taking two buses to work and telling the kids everything was fine.
  My son must have heard me on the phone with the mechanic. He’d added that line himself, in small letters at the very bottom, under “Cucumbers $2” and “Tomatoes $3.” I’d walked past that sign every day for two months and never once read the bottom.
  “He told me the whole plan the first Saturday,” said our neighbor, Mr. Norris. “I’m not buying a cucumber. I’m investing in the plan.” Then he mentioned he’d been an auto mechanic for 35 years before he retired.
  That night, I counted my son’s coffee can: $463. Mr. Norris looked at our car the next morning and said he’d fix it himself, in our driveway, if we just bought the parts. The parts came to $410.
  Two Saturdays later, the car started on the first try. The first place we drove to was Mr. Norris’s house, to deliver one cucumber, free. When we got home, my son crossed out his crayon line and wrote underneath it: “CAR FIXED. CUCUMBERS STILL $2.”

• Volunteers at an animal shelter in Durham, North Carolina, turned an empty strip of land behind the kennels into a vegetable garden, just for the dogs. They grow pumpkins, carrots, sweet potatoes and green beans, all safe for dogs in small amounts, and bake them into homemade treats.
  Now the shelter dogs line up at the fence whenever the “treat ladies” arrive. Last fall, they baked 600 pumpkin treats, and every dog that got adopted went home with a little bag of them.

• My husband grew exactly one watermelon this summer. He named it Gerald. He checked on Gerald every morning and gently turned him so he’d ripen evenly.
  The night before he planned to pick it, a raccoon ate half of Gerald. My husband held a small service in the backyard, and our kids gave the eulogy. Gerald II’s seeds have already been ordered. It’s his favorite hobby, and our favorite comedy.

• Our 70-year-old neighbor is a retired chef who grows 30 varieties of hot peppers in his backyard: jalapeños, habaneros, even ghost peppers. Every October, he hosts “Hot Sauce Day.” Neighbors bring their empty bottles, he cooks a giant pot in his kitchen, and everyone goes home with bottles labeled with their house number.
  Last year, 40 neighbors showed up. “Cooking for one is boring,” he told me. “Cooking for the whole street? That’s a hobby.”

• Every November 1st, our neighbor in Ann Arbor, Michigan walks the block pulling a wagon and collects everyone’s leftover jack-o’-lanterns before they rot on the porches. She chops them up and adds them to her giant compost pile.
  Every spring, she knocks on each door with a bucket of rich, dark compost and the same line: “Here’s your pumpkin back.” Our tomatoes have never been happier.

• For my grandparents’ 60th anniversary in May, all 14 grandkids chipped in for six rose bushes, one for each decade they’d been married. We planted them along the walkway to their front door in Roanoke, Virginia, each with a little sign: “1960s,” “1970s,” all the way to “2020s.”
  Grandma walks the “decade path” every morning with her coffee. She says she’s not picking a favorite bush. Grandpa says hers is obviously the 1960s.