digitS'
Garden Master
Edited: Oh, there were other responses while I was typing! Helpful bunch aren't we 
!?
A volunteer is sown by the parent plant. The gardener may have planted the parents but not the volunteer. It "volunteered" to grow on its own.
The neighbor grew a zucchini variety one year. The blossoms must have been pollinated by the pumpkins nearby. He didn't harvest all his zucchini fruits and the seed was tilled into the garden the next spring. Volunteers showed up around the garden.
The problem for me was that these volunteers were in with my squash plants. I thought that they were from my planted seed. It turned out that they produced a fruit that was not useful to me, at all :/.
Meanwhile, the neighbor allowed a good number of the volunteers to grow. None of the useless fruit was taken out of the garden. The tractor guy showed up the next spring and tilled in a TON of this darn seed! Now we really had a self-inflicted "weed" in our gardens.
Steve showed up in the neighbor's garden (with permission) and removed every cucurbit plant he could find. He came back a couple of more times and did the same. (He really should also do that for the neighbor's raspberry jungle and its resident Italian thistles . . . but this sort of thing can only be taken so far.)
Steve
!?A volunteer is sown by the parent plant. The gardener may have planted the parents but not the volunteer. It "volunteered" to grow on its own.
The neighbor grew a zucchini variety one year. The blossoms must have been pollinated by the pumpkins nearby. He didn't harvest all his zucchini fruits and the seed was tilled into the garden the next spring. Volunteers showed up around the garden.
The problem for me was that these volunteers were in with my squash plants. I thought that they were from my planted seed. It turned out that they produced a fruit that was not useful to me, at all :/.
Meanwhile, the neighbor allowed a good number of the volunteers to grow. None of the useless fruit was taken out of the garden. The tractor guy showed up the next spring and tilled in a TON of this darn seed
! Now we really had a self-inflicted "weed" in our gardens.Steve showed up in the neighbor's garden (with permission) and removed every cucurbit plant he could find. He came back a couple of more times and did the same. (He really should also do that for the neighbor's raspberry jungle and its resident Italian thistles . . . but this sort of thing can only be taken so far
.)Steve
