Volunteer Plants

One of the advantages of having living organic soil is that you get a lot of “volunteers.”  By volunteers I mean desirable plants that sprout entirely on their own from old seed lying in the soil.  The seeds wait for mild weather before they germinate.

I discover some of my most productive volunteers in the herb garden.  I regularly see seedlings of basil, Thai basil, dill and cilantro coming up where I least expect them.  If I like where they are, I leave them in place.  If they’re in a bad spot, then I just transplant them.

I also get blessed with a whole group of vegetable volunteers:  green onions, pak choi, red leaf amaranth, New Zealand spinach and tomatoes.  I deliberately spread around the seeds from all these volunteers (except the tomatoes) so I don’t know if they’re volunteers in the truest sense of the term.

Whenever I see a tomato volunteer I uproot it.  You never know what kind of tomato you are going to get with volunteers.  I think tomatoes are too labor intensive to waste time and resources on a volunteer that could turn out to be a dud.

I also have to thin out a lot of the red leaf amaranth.  I just don’t have enough room to accommodate the dozens of amaranth volunteers.

Another vegetable volunteer that I see frequently are boniato sprouts (slips).  A boniato is a Cuban sweet potato which is less sweet than our sweet potato and which has a cream-colored flesh.  Boniato is ideally suited for our climate.  It grows well with very little care from spring all the way to the first hard freeze.

In the spring I take the boniato slips that sprout up from old pieces of tuber and I replant them (initially) into one gallon containers.  They take root very quickly and provide me with a boniato crop for the new season.

Every day in the garden is a little bit like Christmas morning.  You never know what new presents you’re going to receive.

What volunteers do you have growing in your garden?  Please let us know by adding a comment.