• Do you need help identifying a 🌶?
    Is your plant suffering from an unknown issue? 🤧
    Then ask in Identification and Diagnosis.

What do y'all do with your volunteer plants?

Bicycle808

Bicycle808

Some of my long term beds have hundreds of volunteers sprouting up, pretty much just annuums. No sign of Chinense. They are so tiny now, and all my starts are so far ahead of them, in not tempted to like really grow then out... But I'm thinking of maybe growing some indoors, for shits and giggles. Or maybe leave one or two in the bed, plant around them, and see what comes of it?

What do y'all do with them?
 
The volunteers fascinate me.
 
I had a really mild winter, so I even have a few Chinense volunteers.
 
I have a spot where I threw most of my damaged and/or over-ripe peppers, and it began to explode with peppers also.
 
Like you said, my volunteers are way behind the seedlings I started indoors.
 
I already have a crowded plant-out area, so I have to be selective about any volunteers that pop up in my beds.
 
I'm going to pot-up about 6 or 8 of them, and I have one spot where I'm going to let them go, and see how they do.
 
I'm having a lot of fun with my volunteers, but I think many of these domesticated varieties have become reliant on us to really produce well.
 
Normally i would pull out anything i was not sure about. This year though it looks like i got some volunteer Dreadies and if thats true i want them. Which reminds me.... i need to check those pots today after the storms we had. Many leftover Dreadies fell in those 3 pots so im gunna try and salvage the best looking pot.
 
 
 
I usually yank the pepper volunteers because I've invested months planning and starting pepper plants inside.  Tomato volunteers are a different story.  Some of my personal best varieties started as volunteers.  All other volunteers are fair game for saving.  I usually have lots of nice Romaine lettuce and herb volunteers.  Mrs. Dangler's flowers are mostly all volunteers too.  
 
Thanks for weighing in, everyone. It's cool that other growers notice these things. I hope other folks respond, especially ppl from Warner climates where the volunteers have a better chance. I recall seeing a Gary M (Windchicken) video on YouTube where he had zillions of NagaBrains volunteers pop up in the vicinity of his Zapotecs. I bet he harvested pods from those, of he left then, as he's in Louisiana...


Harry_Dangler said:
... Tomato volunteers are a different story.  Some of my personal best varieties started as volunteers.  
Click to expand...
Tomatoes are actually the thing that started my obsession with the concept of volunteers. Last year, at the community garden, some guy who'd grown 2017 had abandoned his plot before the 2018 even really started. I started weeding it, in hopes someone else would maybe Adopt it. It never happened, but I noticed a bunch of what appeared to be Tiny tomatoes plants amongst the sawgrass and goldenrod and shit like that, so I left them intact. Several of them grew pretty big, and we're covered with those little yellow grape tomatoes that I love so much...

I think what really blew my mind this year is how the "natural" volunteers sprout up in the beds. It totally makes sense, but I never thought about it; clusters of like twenty to fifty sprouts come up in unison wherever an intact pods was left back at seasons' end. Examining them, it seemed like maybe ten percent of them were helmet heads that were in the midst of repairing themselves. But, the little clusters of many spirits reminded me of Juanito's mass-starts from his grow log, and it made me feel like maybe he's really onto something with that strategy...

But yeah, other than giggle-factor, there is no reason to grow any of these out. They're mostly in the Jalapeño and Serrano regions of the 2018 grow, and the Jalapeño and Serrano plants I started for 2019 are light-years ahead, plus in focusing on one strain of Jalapeño so there's no sense in rolling the dice with these things...

Still, I have little to lose by leaving a few on the edges of the bed intact, right? Just for the aforementioned shits& giggles, it might be fun.
 
I have a couple flower pots that reseed themselves every year, Petunias in one Snapdragons in the other that usually come out pretty good. Tomatillo likes to volunteer in the garden and I like to let those go when they aren't in the way. Last year I got a few Fatalii volunteers that managed to produce a few pods before they froze out at the end of the season.
 
My neighbor works in the kitchen at a senior care facility.  This provides her with an awesome stream of kitchen cuttings for her mulch pile.
 
Along with mountains of iced tea and coffee grinds, she gets a ton of kitchen scraps.
 
Her mulch pile kicks my mulch pile's ass!
 
Around this time of year, it's pretty normal for the fresh tomato scraps to produce tomato volunteers boiling up out of her mulch pile.
 
I grew them out 2 years ago, and actually got a few tomatoes out of these plants before the summer heat hit.
 
I just assumed these commercially grown tomatoes would not produce fruit in the next generation, but they actually did OK (for my part of the country).
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top