My first foray into what one might call serious biology happened when I was eight. Botany, to be exact.

Springtime was always a big thing for my dad. Not just because the snow was gone, which was news that any red-blooded child knew ought to be met with horror and dismay. But that was when he got the garden ready for planting and tidied up the beds of things that stayed in the ground year-round or, in the case of the dill, inevitably came back whether he wanted them to or not so he might as well cultivate them properly. Watching him till the soil and put the seeds in their neat little rows had passed a few springtime evenings for me already. That year, though, I’d asked if I could have my own garden.

Maybe I had dreams of a big garden that would be even bigger and better and make more fruit than his garden, but I was ecstatic all the same when he marked out one corner of his fresh-tilled plot and said that was for me. I was at a loss when he took me down to his supply room asked what I wanted to grow there, but then I saw the tomato cages stacked in one corner and I had my answer.

He helped me out, of course – as well as being much too young and small to handle the tiller, I didn’t actually know a damn thing about raising plants. But though he gave me supplies and told me what to do, it was still my garden. I went with him to the greenhouse and picked out the variety of tomatoes I wanted. I dug out the little holes in the ground like he’d told me to, eased the seedlings out of their little cups, and laid them in the ground. I put the cages over them and pushed the wire down into the soil.

It wasn’t just tomatoes I grew, either. He gave me my first introduction to companion plants – parsley, whose flowers would bring good bugs that would keep bad bugs away from the tomatoes; asparagus, to keep other bad bugs away from the roots, and which the tomatoes would shelter in turn from bugs that would otherwise eat it. He didn’t explain until years later that the “good bugs” parsley brought were parasitic wasps, and it was probably just as well.

Weeding became a regular thing. He taught me what to watch for, which leaves and shoots were new growth of the ones I wanted and which ones weren’t anything I wanted at all. He taught me how to work a trowel to dig weeds out of the ground so they wouldn’t come back, at least not so fast, as if I’d just broken off the stems. He also taught me when to leave well enough alone, especially when the plants were still tiny and fragile.

Some part of me was still a little kid who was impatient with the slow progress my plants were making. But there was definitely some satisfaction to be had when the cages became covered with leafy vines. And then they flowered, and started to show fruit. And then the little green fruit started to turn gold.

When it came time to harvest the first bunch of ripe golden cherry tomatoes, I popped the first one in my mouth then and there. And it was delicious.