Volunteering

2-yr-old Clare, Queen of the Compost


I have a couple of poppies flowering in my new flower bed. I had thought about planting poppies, but I didn't get around to it. I haven't grown poppies in probably 10 years, and yet, there they are, one pink and one purple (I've never even grown purple ones). They volunteered, out of the not-yet-compost I use as mulch. I used to get seeds through seed swaps in the backs of gardening magazines, and I sort of remember getting some purple poppies from a woman named Ella, back around 1996. Two years ago, I decided that my seed collecton was too large - when was I ever going to plant all these things? And besides, so many of them are really old. I purged my collection and tossed SIX CUPS of seeds onto the compost pile. That was hard to do! I was trying to be realistic, but by composting them I still was holding out hope that some would live on.

I love the game of chance you play by allowing for volunteers. We had a wonderful little tomato last year, smaller than your average cherry, bigger than a pea, garbanzo bean size, I guess. Tasty, they were. Don't know where that came from, maybe it was a cross from the "spoon" tomatoes I'd grown the previous several years and something else. By the way, Spoon tomatoes are so tiny they are annoying - smaller than peas, most were 1/8 to 3/16" across. Nonetheless, I picked them. Gathered almost a quarter cup one day (eye roll).
So this year, after mulching the new raspberry bed and thinking I could probably grow something else to share the bed this year, we had lots of pumpkins sprout up. So it will be a combination raspberry bed/pumpkin patch. Hope the berries don't mind! This year we also have swiss chard, without planting it anew, as well as carrots, red lettuce and basil voluteers. And one tomato (hoping it will be the "garbanzo" cherry from last year!) amidst the sunflower volunteers.