Thank you very much
Let’s suppose you are browsing the bean department of the market and the greengrocer hands you free tomatoes plus some cilantro. How very generous and kind! And as a bonus just for shopping, you get some parsley and lettuce on your way out the door.
Or suppose you are roaming your own garden space drinking tea on a cloudy spring morning and notice volunteer tomato seedlings sprouting between little red radishes. Same thing– free tomatoes, except you need to tend to the seedlings for a while, but soon enough you get your gifts.
The point is, useful plants often just sprout in a garden if you let them. In my experience, most volunteer tomato plants bear cherry tomatoes. I had a volunteer tomato seedling once that wanted to stay for the summer, so I installed a tomato cage for support, and one Friday in August I picked about 100 plump cherry tomatoes. One week later I picked 150 from the same plant. My input was to let it be, add water occasionally and harvest, and for minimal effort the return was tomato sauce during the winter. Main crop varieties also volunteer, but a gardener never knows the variety till the fruit shows up.
Tomatoes are not the only vegetables that sprout unannounced. You need the luxury of patience and enough space to let plants go to seed, and some such as lettuce, parsley or radishes get gangly as they go through the whole process, plus it takes time. Parsley and chard plants flower the second year if they last that long, and creative gardeners can use tomato cages or whatever to support and contain them.
Few vegetable plants experience their entire life cycle because we harvest them before they flower. Most gardeners have never seen a lettuce plant produce flowers or seeds. It’s an individual choice, but one strategy for seed-saving is to simply pick leaves from a lettuce or basil, but maintain a healthy plant until it flowers.
Broccoli produces seeds in pods. Cilantro produces coriander balls as seeds. Dill culminates in umbels with seeds on the tips of pedicels. Wind carries dill seeds from one bed to another, or seeds fall all around to sprout later.
Another source of volunteers is a bed in which the gardener spread compost. The compost process heats up enough to kill many seeds but not all. Tomato seeds are tough that way and they are famous for sprouting out of compost. Same for winter squash and melons, but you never know what you will get unless you know exactly what went into the compost. If you have space, let a couple volunteers go and see what you get. One year, I had wonderful surprise watermelons from a surprise vine rambling down a pathway.
In a stroll through my spring garden, I found these volunteer varieties sprouting: red mustard, tomatoes, parsley, dill, cilantro, burnet, chives, Malabar spinach, arugula, amaranth, two beans and a pepper… but it’s early and we’re just getting started. Also, runners from the strawberry patch escaped into a pathway and rooted to make new plants. I’m a kid at Easter exploring the garden.
For even more fun, there are also morning glories, cosmos, dock, lamb’s quarters, chives, marigolds, two different monardas plus other useful plants sprouting all over. Some of them are destined to spice up the compost, some are consumable and some are for flowers, but they show up on time ready to go to work.
A gardener does not have to work hard to benefit from volunteer plants. Shepherd just one lettuce plant through its entire life cycle and the end result will be hundreds of viable seeds. There’s a lot you can do if you don’t try not to.