At first, Matthew Frey thought someone was messing with him.
He had been fielding calls from friends and family since The New York Times reported on his discovery: a tomato plant with a single red fruit that he had found growing atop a piling in the East River while he paddled his kayak near the Brooklyn Bridge on Labor Day.
But as he made another trip on Thursday morning to check on his find, there it was, a few pilings farther out from shore: a second plant, this one heavy with 15 or so little yellow and green tomatoes.
“I just couldn’t believe it,” said Mr. Frey, who is a board member of the Brooklyn Bridge Park Boathouse, and a teacher with the Kayak Foundation. “It looks like a cherry tomato, like the one I’d get at the food co-op.”
This plant, like the first, was rooted deep in a hole made by a boring nail on the top of the wooden piling. And it posed the same riddle: Who or what had planted it?
Balancing on his craft during high tide, he tugged on the stem, just to see if someone had deposited the plant there in the last few days. “People do crazy things for a selfie,” he said, “but it seemed to be well-rooted. That little hole is the perfect spot for something to land.”
After he found the first plant, scientists interviewed by The Times said the most likely explanation was that a bird had ingested tomato seeds, then excreted them while flying over the river.
News of the first plant touched off considerable glee on social media and even inspired someone (or something) to create a Twitter account called “I, East River Tomato.” That plant has since lost its lone tomato.
“It’s not a real happy plant,” said Jim Giovannoni when he examined Mr. Frey’s photo of the first tomato. Dr. Giovannoni, a United States Department of Agriculture molecular biologist at Cornell University who has been studying tomatoes for more than 30 years, said it looked stressed, because “it’s not very bushy.”
Still, the yellow flowers remained on the first plant, a wink at more to come — and another sign that the river is getting cleaner.
As Mr. Frey floated in his kayak and pondered the mystery of the two plants, one thing seemed clear to him: “This is our garden, I guess.”
