I believe in small gardens. I believe that a few raised beds, tended well, can produce more food and more satisfaction than an acre of neglected rows. At Freighter View Farms, I garden in about 200 square feet of raised beds, and it’s enough.
I believe in saving seeds. Not because it saves money — though it does — but because it connects you to something larger than a single season. When I plant a tomato seed I saved from last year’s best fruit, I’m continuing a line that stretches back through my garden and before that through someone else’s. Seed saving is the most hopeful thing a gardener can do.
I believe in heirloom varieties. Not exclusively — I’m not dogmatic about it — but because they carry flavor and history that modern hybrids have traded away for shipping durability and shelf life. A Cherokee Purple tomato will never survive a cross-country truck ride. But it doesn’t need to if you grow it yourself.
I believe in growing what you eat and eating what you grow. My garden doesn’t produce ornamental curiosities. It produces tomatoes for sauce, peppers for the grill, herbs for the kitchen, and flowers for the table. Everything earns its space.
I believe in the rhythm of it. The long, impatient wait of winter. The frantic energy of spring planting. The abundance of summer. The gratitude of fall harvest. The garden teaches you that everything has its season, including you.
I believe that gardening makes you a better person. More patient. More observant. More willing to accept what you can’t control and more committed to doing well what you can. I’ve never met a gardener I didn’t like.
I believe in sharing. Seeds, knowledge, surplus tomatoes with the neighbors. The garden is generous, and so should we be. Every seed packet I give away at Christmas carries a little piece of Freighter View Farms into someone else’s yard. That’s the whole point.
I believe in doing it imperfectly. My garden has weeds. My tomatoes get blossom end rot sometimes. I plant things too early and lose them to frost. None of that matters. What matters is that I keep showing up, keep learning, keep saving the best seeds for next year.
I believe the view helps. Watching freighters pass through Saginaw Bay while you work in the garden is a privilege I don’t take for granted. It puts everything in perspective — the scale of those ships, the patience of the water, the smallness of your own little plot of earth. And somehow that smallness feels like exactly enough.
— Chris Izworski writes from Freighter View Farms on the shores of Saginaw Bay in Bay City, Michigan.
Chris Izworski is a Michigan gardener, writer, and AI technologist based on Saginaw Bay. He writes at Freighter View Farms about Zone 6a gardening, seed saving, and practical AI in public safety.
Freighter View Farms | Chris Izworski 
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