Any volunteers?

[JessicaS]

I had some heirloom tomatoes last year and I guess some dropped into the box. I have peppers planted there this year but a tomato is in the middle of them.


Last year it snowed not long after Halloween and then snowed a bit more...

We never threw away our pumpkin. I have a pumpkin growing in my garden by my door.

[CariOfOz]

LMAO I love it! I am a container gardener, so I don't really get volunteers One day I hope to though!

[mumm]

I have some squashy type plant growing in the middle of my grass, maybe pumpkin?. And some tomatillos by the chicken coop. They won't do much in the shade.

[SuburbanHippie]

Half of the plants in my garden came out of last years compost. I took out about half of the pumpkin sprouts and this is what I'm still dealing with

http://i16.photobucket.com/albums/b4...s/IMG_2285.jpg

That pic was 2 weeks ago. It's even taller (past the chain link fence) and bushier if that's possible. They have grown over the top of 4 of my tomato plants. Some of my tomato plants are as tall as me now! Fighting for the sun and all. It's crazy. I also had about a hundred tomato plants pop up. I left under half of them. So there are huge patches of tomato plants with beefsteak tomatoes growing on them. They're very short in comparison to the ones I grew in my basement for obvious reasons.

We have about 6 pumpkins growing so far and more tomatoes than I can count. Thank you, compost!

[palmgal]

We have a volunteer tomato growing quite nicely. We replanted it in a pot that was unfortunatly too small, but it still has quite a few fruit.

[Owen'nZoe]

I had a horrible time with flooding right around planting time (well, not actual flooding, but we were getting heavy rain almost every day, and all my seeds washed away repeatedly). If it weren't for volunteers, I wouldn't have much of a garden!

I had parsley, cilantro and dill reseed. My entire lettuce patch was transplanted volunteers, as were most of my radishes. And I have 2 beautiful tomato plants which are doing great even as the plants I bought from my local nursery are succumbing to blight.

[kdaisy]

Apparently I use compost that hasn't composted enough!

I have about 6 pumpkins from last year's that I have left. There were about a billion tomatoes that I weeded. I even have two potatoes growing from potato slices in the compost!

[JamieCatheryn]

My yellow current tomatoes I planted 2 years ago are back again.

[tankgirl73]

I've got a box full of volunteer potatoes from spuds I'd missed. Good thing too, because all the potatoes I grew from new, certified seed potatoes, mysteriously died. I had blight last year so I hesitated letting the volunteers grow, but decided to try it. So far so good! They look beautiful.

I have tons of volunteer dill. I harvested the seeds last year but apparently I missed a lot of them lol... I transplanted the baby plants to pots and have lots of beautiful, tall dill plants now.

And I've got a dozen onions that I also missed last year -- just small ones, and since it's their second year they're going to flower and seed. I'll save the seeds and start all over. And they're ENORMOUS. I'm not kidding, the flower stalk on the biggest one is 5 feet tall and like 2 inches thick!!!

[Callimom]

This thread is cracking me up
We have a community garden plot - I have sunflowers popping up in my beans and something unidentifiable so far that I have hacked down and pulled about 3 times and it keeps coming back.

Other than that - just strawberry runners from my neighbours, raspberry canes from the nearby community patch and mint - omg the mint.

Karen

[FarmerCathy]

Don't you just love volunteers?

[pixiepunk]

yup! we have 3 white currant tomato plants volunteering in an old bed we didn't use this year, and a positively ginormous pumpkin that we can only assume must've come from a seed that hadn't completely composted because it's in an enclosed bed that we made last fall, tilled, fertilized, and had intended for a second asparagus bed but we didn't get around to putting the asparagus in.

[tankgirl73]

Fruits of the volunteers! I just got a good-sized baby potato from one of my volunteer potato plants! This is great because I've heard some people say they had poor results from their potato volunteers.

But mine are overflowing the box (and I was careful to not overcrowd the plants like I did last year, I re-planted the volunteers when they were little to space them out) already... flowering and even fruiting (I'd never seen potato fruit before last year, but I'm getting them again this year)...

There's 3 different varieties (assuming all 3 varieties I grew last year left volunteers, and I think they did since there were some in all areas of the box), the red one is what I just harvested. I also checked some of the white ones, and there's no harvestable babies yet but there are definitely lots of little potato buds.

So far, no serious blight issues... the weather has been good, sufficient rain but not too damp, lots of hot sunny days. There are leaves getting some suspicious-looking spots, especially on lower leaves, I'm not sure that they're blight though or just something else... But I'm trimming them off the moment I see them and throwing it out... Last year I left the suspicious leaves on, not knowing what they were, wanting to see what happened with them heh... Until they started taking over, and I learned what it was, and was in catch-up panic mode for the rest of the season...

[Owen'nZoe]

Ha! I have more than I realized - I had a whole plot of what I thought were cherry husk tomatoes I planted this spring - but now that they are fruiting, I see little cherry tomatoes with no husks. Does anyone know whether the husks appear later, or do I have volunteer cherry tomatoes on my hands? I wouldn't be surprised - I put a ton of overripe cherry tomatoes on the compost pile last fall...