Volunteers

Since I spend so much of my gardening time planning where plants should go, sometimes serendipity gets forgotten.

That's real serendipity, not the "Oh no, how can I fit another one in here?" or just plain forgetting the plan kind of changes.

I was utterly committed to getting a blog post up today, especially after reading some great posts all around the garden crew last night. I may not have much time, but I do love reading your posts! But when I went outside with the camera, the reality of doing a real catch up post daunted me. Suffice it to say that the summer crops are coming on, although we're some time away from ripe tomatoes, I'm experimenting with cover crops -- who knew?, and I may still have underplanted pickling cucumbers, because every recipe I see says "Take ten pounds of pickling cucumbers," and I'm getting one about every three days. Any ideas?

But what did strike me, besides an overwhelming urge NOT to overwhelm anyone with my whole garden, was how many plants I had nothing to do with are popping or popped up.

So, I give you my volunteers. (This does not include the small tomato plants that keep popping up in the old tomato bed, in between the cucumbers, because I am ruthlessly ripping them out whenever I see them. Some restraint must be exercised, I believe. Nor does it include the true, and truly tenacious volunteers, my weeds. I'm doing as well as I can with them, but under control they aren't.)

Those would be the tat soi babies. Everywhere a seed dropped, up they popped. In walkways (some being stomped on), in beds, beside bean plants, everywhere. So if you were wondering? Tat soi is apparently a year-round plant in the Bay Area. Good thing, too -- it's a nice green. Perhaps I'll actually sow some after I eat these up.

This baby is something big. A pumpkin? A Marina di Chioggia? Something huge. I'm going to let it go a bit and see what happens, although that's not my general inclination with big volunteers. I'm just so impressed with the size. Each seed leaf has to be 3" long.

For some reason, I don't have my pictures of the tomato and rasperry right by the chicken coop, nor the oregano taking over part of the front yard, nor the volunteer tomato out front with biggish green tomatoes on it -- that plant is easily 6' tall now.

So I'm enjoying the ease with which these plants are popping up, and in the true spirit of volunteers, I'm not babying them at all. We'll just see how things go. Maybe I can figure out how to get more of that spirit into my planned plantings too.