My fire-escape tomato plant taught me about survival and resilience

I’ll start with what I thought was the middle.

I checked the weather reports, and a major storm was fast approaching. I still hadn’t figured out a way to secure my tomato plant against heavy winds. With its pot nestled in the corner of my fire escape, it had long ago overgrown the three-foot, cone-shaped cage I bought from the garden center, and the fire escape rails were doing most of the caging. Bringing her inside through the window was no longer an option; she was five feet tall and snaking over the rails.

The last time a major storm had come through – a hailstorm – the plant received a brutal pruning from Mother Nature, and I was scared of round two. I sent out an SOS via my Instagram stories to crowdsource ideas on how to secure the plant. Ultimately, no suggestions I received or strategies I researched made sense. I asked for thoughts and prayers from a captive audience.

As the storm began to rage with incredibly high winds, I peered out the window. When the plant seemed shaky, I uttered a brief prayer, “Please, keep the plant safe,” and, immediately, she would find balance. While she stood strong in the foreground, the decades-old trees lining the sidewalks of the public housing across the street were flimsily waving in the wind.

The next day as the sun came out, the news and social media friends reported that the volatile winds pulled tree roots from the ground all over New York, smashing cars and phone and internet cables, leaving people without power and the ability to have their Zoom meetings. Outside my window, I also saw trees uprooted, toppled to the ground, and, yet, there Mama T stood, unscathed.

That’s when I knew there was something more to my fire escape gardening, a confluence of activating the green thumb I didn’t know I had, cultivating support, and building a virtual community during a time when we were glued to our phones more than ever. Case in point: For much of summer 2020, I just called her Tomato Plant until one day friends online started calling her Mama T. The people named her and rallied around her from afar, and by extension, rallied around me.

I’m no stranger to facilitating community connections. As a socially engaged dance-theater maker, it is one of my superpowers. But this was different. This wasn’t in-person, experiential magic-making. This was unexpected virtual connection as I quarantined in my Harlem apartment. I was getting text messages and DMs full of gardening advice, professional emails that greeted me by asking about Mama T, and an all-tomato cookbook as a snail mail gift, while colleagues mentioned the plant in the press.

In 2021, I tried my luck again. Just like the first year, I sliced a plum tomato from my groceries, divided the slices among two small pots and covered them with soil. With a much more active work schedule in year two of the pandemic, I almost forgot about the burgeoning seedlings except for keeping the soil moist. One day I looked up and each pot was overcrowded with leafy sprouts. I’d inadvertently started a tomato plant nursery.

I once again turned to the internet, this time asking, Who wants a plant? Before I knew it, a tomato plant and I were nurturing community again. Two plants became housewarming gifts: one for friends relocating to New York and another for friends who just bought their first home. One for a friend’s mom whom she affectionately calls a Garden Gnome, while another shook loose its Cafe Bustelo coffee can pot to take root in a grandpa’s garden. One journeyed south to Baltimore to start a life at a slower pace, and seven more dispersed to a more local south – Brooklyn – as well as further west in Harlem, and the Bronx.

Upon harvest, the tomatoes themselves were delicious (had I ever really eaten a tomato before I grew them myself?) and abundant (I’ve sometimes eaten the last of my summer tomatoes in December). My fire-escape-to-table eating included endless Caprese salads, margherita pizzas, tomato tarts and more. But mostly, I would eat a side of tomato with each meal – sliced, drizzled with olive oil, kosher salt and freshly cracked black pepper.

Every summer since, my fire escape has been home to an assortment of pots decorating the side of my building with such herbs as basil, rosemary and mint, and other vegetables such as peppers, and, for the first time this year, butternut squash. As I told a friend: I’ve done very well for the first time I’ve ever grown anything edible from seed, on a whim, because I had a pot and some dirt and the apocalypse outside unearthed my survival skills. Unexpectedly, I was channeling ancestors. One day as I picked fruit from the plant while chatting with my parents on FaceTime, my dad sat back in awe: “If only your granddad could see this.”

In the time I began growing food on my fire escape, I experienced the traumatic loss of one of my dearest friends and produced the largest-scale dance theater production of my career and its tour while navigating a crumbling arts ecosystem. With no end in sight to ongoing plague, chaos and global crisis, we’ve all found something or someone to lean on. Other people have emotional support animals. I have emotional support plants; they’ve turned my home into a sanctuary. The ability to wake up each morning, open my window and tend to my garden became spiritual. Planting, watering, repotting, pruning, harvesting, then cooking and eating, all sacred.

A little over a month ago my building superintendent called, telling me to dismantle the garden because of building-violation threats from the city. In 48 hours, I had to undo – literally untangling squash vines and tendrils from the fire escape rails – the one thing that has been sustaining my peace through a tumultuous first two quarters of the year. In grief, I gifted my tomatoes and squash to a friend of a friend, a Bronx homeowner with a backyard garden. Now, my window sills are crowded with what’s left: hanging herbs and medium-size pepper pots that I sneak back outside often to catch the rain. I’m no longer tending glorious vining vegetables winding through iron rails, but I am getting my gardening fix.

Looking back, I thought that 2020 midsummer rainstorm was the middle of my gardening story, but it was actually just the beginning of a tale of resilience, self-discovery and community, reaping some potent lessons years later. My fire escape garden reaffirmed for me that I can cultivate whatever I need for myself and others, and that if I have to cultivate something new or start over, I can.

Sharing my joy of gardening and cooking reminds me that I am connected to and protected by a deep network of community that wants me to grow and thrive. And that very first tomato plant, Mama T, taught me most importantly that my ancestors have gifted me superpowers that I haven’t even uncovered yet.