“Volunteer Plants” is a term for ones that come up of their own accord. Some are commonly known as weeds although occasionally you can find a way of redefining these ones as something useful, like the chamomile that comes up every year at my allotment and give me a harvest of flowers I can dry for chamomile tea.
Another category are the ones that come up in homemade compost. It can be hard to get the heap to run hot enough to destroy seeds and even a hot heap will have cooler edges. Tomatoes are one example of a plant that is remarkably resilient – apparently they often pop up at sewage treatment works, having been digested, flushed and washed along the sewers! At the moment, I’ve got several seedlings that are recognisably members of the cucurbitaceae popping up in my polytunnel in a patch that I topped up with some of my garden compost a few weeks ago.
The trouble with volunteers is that they don’t come with labels. Those plants springing up could be from discarded pots that seemed not to germinate (three varieties of squash and courgette this year and not all came up), they could be from the squash I grew last year or they could even be from an earlier batch including cucumbers (that particular lot of compost had sat for a while). It is going to be hard to tell them apart until they get a lot larger and, in some cases, even fruiting won’t be enough for a definite ID.
I’ve potted one up today and I’ll probably do more later this week. I don’t know exactly what they are and I’ll have to guess how to look after them but perhaps I’ll get some pleasant surprises. Even if not, it will still be more fuel for the heap!
