Volunteer virtues
If allowed, I can go on and on about the virtues of letting vegetables spread their own seeds and establish themselves. So, let’s get that out of the way.
Just by sheer instinct, luck or negligence, along the way I have allowed particular plants in a bed to completely mature and produce seeds that drop right on the spot, though sometimes the next generation shows up two beds over.
I recently went to the garden and found different volunteer vegetables had sprouted at least two beds over. It happened like this… moseyed through the gate, two steps in swiveled 90° left, took four more steps and there it was – Petroselinum crispum (parsley to you and me) in the pathway cozied against a rock border.
A few years ago, I let two parsley plants a few beds downhill go to seed. It took two years and they got gangly and wide, but they produced plenty of seeds just like they were supposed to. There is always parsley now under the redbud, but this patch is uphill at the top of the garden.
If parsley were a university, its mascot would be the entire vitamin and mineral chart. Plus, it has more apigenin than anything else you eat, and, as you know, apigenin helps relieve your anxiety. Whew! I feel better already.
Right beside the parsley were two freshly frosted volunteer Red Russian kale plants. Kale has almost as much vitamin A as carrots and twice as much vitamin C as persimmons, but its claim to fame is being loaded with quercetin and other antioxidants and cancer-fighting compounds.
So far, with only the first two volunteers, I’m calmer and less oxidized.
And toward the other side of the garden, in the middle of the path beside the asparagus, is an island of red mustard upstarts. Like kale, red mustard contains antioxidants and detoxifying compounds, and it’s a calming dark red-purple like nothing else. The leaves are tangy but not too spicy, and a single family might not need more than three or four plants. If you let a plant produce seeds, you’ll have dozens of seedlings. Nobody in your neighborhood will be more detoxified than you.
I also encountered two frilly bright green mustards that I do not remember ever planting, so they’re either a cross or a mystery– either way, very cool and tasty with the same health benefit credibility as red mustard.
The most prolific of all was arugula. A couple years ago, one of the arugula plants had simple leaves instead of lobed leaves. I let it go to seed, and now most of Peaville is thick with plain-leaf arugula. Like other brassicas, the compounds in arugula fortify the immune system and provide ample doses of vitamins B, A, C and K.
A couple of the volunteer arugulas are producing leaves eight inches long, which is a new Olympic record in my garden. Next year, I’ll get to see what kind of offspring they produce.
Mixed in with the arugula is a healthy stand of dill that has withstood the weather so far. Dill is a handy topping for when clever chefs like myself bake potatoes. Smart folks claim dill aids digestion and even eases insomnia, and I like its distinctive aroma.
There are also several hearty lettuces holding their own against the cold nights. Besides all the vitamins, the compounds hiding in lettuce promote bone strength and might even help a person go to sleep. Lettuce appreciates protection from the coldest nights.
So I picked a few leaves of each of the volunteers, and what I walked away with had the potential to ease anxiety, deoxidize, detoxify and immunize where it counts, provide an alphabet of vitamins and maybe help me sleep… and all of it sprouted on its own… it came out of nowhere.