Volunteers You Can Count On

[digitS']

We eat a fair amount of fish, @Dahlia .

DW very much prefers dill on baked fish.

I like it but also like lemon basil on fish, especially salmon/steelhead .

 

[Cosmo spring garden]

Last year my volunteer qinter squash was all I harvested from.my real patch was buried in weeds and the plants didn't do well at all! I also get plenty of cherry tomato volunteers but never slicing or Roma? It's weird!
I also get dill, mustard, bok choy, marigolds, sunflowers, zinnias, potatoes, beans, and few other I can't think of.
They always volunteer where I don't want them .
I do have a habit of letting it grow and soon the garden is a jungle!

 

[Zeedman]

OK, not being able to upload photos is really starting the bother me... still can't figure out where the problem is. A LOT has "come up" on the volunteer topic... maybe even an inter-generic cross. It is a yellow-flowered strawberry, an apparent cross with a yellow-flowered weed growing in my driveway!

AND there is an aggressive weed in the rural garden (that I thought was a milkweed). DW called it an "alien weed" because we didn't know what it was & it is very invasive. It is sending roots 3-4' inside the fence line (where it apparently started) and when hoed, they just come up again. This year I'm late burning the fence line - and it flowered. To judge by the flower (which is almost certainly Physalis) it might be a perennial ground cherry! I'm letting the plant on the fence grow, so I can positively identify the fruit. The shoots coming up in the garden are a PITA though - worse than bindweed, if you can imagine that. (Bindweed is my nemesis in the rural garden, the only perennial weed I have not yet eradicated - because it too just creeps back in from the fence line.) Scientific curiosity aside, it would probably take herbicide to kill this... but I'll be abandoning that garden anyway in a few years (when the property owner sells) so live & let live until then I guess.

The same weed has now popped up on the border of one of my home gardens; whether bird sown, or transferred by my tiller, who knows. Given how invasive its been in the rural garden, I need to kill it quickly here.

AND birds have brought me 2 things I've been wanting; black raspberries, and elderberries. The elderberries are along an open spot in my fence line, so all I need to do there is cut down all the competing brush... the neighbors are OK with that. The raspberry came up on the side of my front driveway; I'm rooting the ends of the canes, so I can transfer them to a permanent location in the back yard.

A Higher Power seems to be tinkering with my yard & gardens this year.

 

[Phaedra]

Birds keep bringing us red currant plants, but so far, we don't have a chance to harvest them. The birds are monitoring the progress!

 

[Zeedman]

Well I finally found a round-about way to transfer photos manually; so the problem is apparently in the computer.

Here is the really odd wild strawberry volunteer:

This is the weed in the driveway that it apparently crossed with:

 

[ducks4you]

@Zeedman , download Irfanview

IrfanView 64-bit version

www.irfanview.com

This program is FREE
I email my photos to myself, then copy image, then paste on Irfanview.
(The desktop icon looks like a red squished cat.)
I usually Auto Adjust Colors
often Sharpen
then I Save As, Name the photo,
in a folder on my computer.
THAT is how I post my pictures and they load up without any trouble.

 

[Phaedra]

Two quickest volunteers this year, another ten or eleven are following. I guess, at least six or seven will contribute nicely.

Volunteer Chamomile are always welcome.

 

[digitS']

Yay, volunteer tomatoes -- I hope that they are tasty, @Phaedra !

I don't have a dozen but have located 3. The one here at home has no chance. There is a volunteer tomato in the Winter squash that is situated about perfectly to avoid competition. The squash vines have trailed off in other directions. It has flowers .

 

[Phaedra]

Yay, volunteer tomatoes -- I hope that they are tasty, @Phaedra !

I don't have a dozen but have located 3. The one here at home has no chance. There is a volunteer tomato in the Winter squash that is situated about perfectly to avoid competition. The squash vines have trailed off in other directions. It has flowers .

I believe they would be tasty - they all came from our compost last year, the cherry tomatoes I grew last year. Because there are so many of them, I sow very few in the spring. However, I have a feeling that we can harvest a decent amount before the first frost hits.

 

[digitS']

I was amazed and disappointed by a cherry in '22.

The plant was just covered with green fruit. Because the first frost was so late, I was hopeful that they would ripen in the garden. Some did.

Tasteless. It was likely a Super Sweet 100 parent. That's a hybrid. Reading about some of the breeding that goes into the production of hybrids informs us that the immediate parent lines may have been hybrids themselves. Whoa -- the genetic complexity!

Whether that was true with this variety or not, the offspring did NOT carry the flavor characteristic that makes S Sweet 100 popular. This was a first for that experience for me. I was so amazed by how many tomatoes were on that plant.

I have had "not true to type" plants show up from packaged hybrid seed. Several were easy to identify with Early Girl hybrid seed. They had the potato leaf characteristic, Early Girl doesn't. Septoria Leaf Spot is sometimes a problem in my tomato patch. Usually, it doesn't amount to much even with the heirloom varieties. Those 3 Early Girl potato leaf plants had it in a fairly serious way. You could see that even at a distance -- the plants were struggling and, simply, must have had about zero resistance to the fungus.

The usual garden volunteers are cherries and without the 6 - 8 week early greenhouse start, they just have a problem ripening. Then, of course, there is my tendency to grow plants from hybrid seed ...

Steve, always curious