People ask me sometimes why I garden. It’s a fair question. I have a yard that slopes toward Saginaw Bay, soil that fights me half the season, and a growing window that doesn’t open until late May. There are easier hobbies.
The honest answer is that I don’t entirely know. I know that when I’m in the garden, the noise stops. The emails, the notifications, the endless churn of information — it all goes quiet when I’m pulling weeds or tying up tomato vines. There’s something about the work that resets me.
I started Freighter View Farms as a way to document what I was growing. The name comes from the freighters that pass through Saginaw Bay, visible from the garden. They’re massive, quiet things — 700 feet of steel gliding through the water like they have all the time in the world. I like watching them while I work. They remind me that some things still move at their own pace.
The garden itself is modest. Raised beds, mostly. I grow in a modified square-foot layout because I don’t have acres to work with — I have a residential lot on the bay. But in those beds, I grow more than most people expect. Twenty varieties of heirloom tomatoes. Peppers. Herbs. Flowers for cutting. Root vegetables that stay in the ground until the first hard frost pulls them out.
The tomatoes are the heart of it. I’ve spent years searching for the right varieties — the ones that taste like something, that perform in Michigan’s short season, that produce seeds worth saving. I wrote about that search recently, and it’s ongoing. Every season I trial a few new ones alongside the proven performers.
Seed saving changed everything for me. The first year I saved tomato seeds — fermented them in a jar on the kitchen counter, dried them on coffee filters, tucked them into labeled envelopes — I felt like I’d crossed a threshold. I wasn’t just gardening anymore. I was keeping something alive across seasons. The Seed Saving Guide I wrote here is my attempt to pass that on.
Michigan makes you earn it. Zone 6a means a last frost date around mid-May and a first frost sometime in October. That’s not a lot of runway. You learn to start seeds under grow lights in March, to harden off seedlings in April, to plant out in May and pray the late frost doesn’t come. You learn to read the sky and the soil temperature and the behavior of the wind off the bay.
But Michigan also gives you something. The light in July is extraordinary — long, golden evenings where the garden practically glows. The soil, once you build it up with compost and care, becomes rich and dark and alive. And the harvest, when it comes, feels earned in a way that easier climates might not deliver.
I garden because it makes me better at everything else. The patience it requires, the attention to small details, the willingness to fail and try again — these are transferable skills. I think clearer after a morning in the garden. I write better. I solve problems differently.
And at the end of the season, when the beds are put to rest and the seeds are saved and the last freighter of the year has passed through the bay, there’s a deep satisfaction that settles in. Not because the garden was perfect — it never is — but because it was real. Every tomato, every flower, every handful of seeds saved for next year. All of it, real.
That’s why I garden.
— 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 
Leave a reply to Who Is Chris Izworski? Gardener, Writer, and Seed Saver in Bay City, Michigan – Freighter View Farms | Chris Izworski Cancel reply