Surprise volunteer plants in our garden!

We have lived on this property for almost 2 years. It has been our second crop year.

One surprise we have had is these crook neck squash. This is the second bumper crop of these squash. Our garden is a jungle of these vines, they are spread all across the garden. There must be 18 or 20 crooked neck squash growing. So here is our surprise, we never planted these. They are totally volunteer, do you have volunteer plants in your garden? The previous owner must have planted them and left some of the squash to spoil in place and the seeds must have wintered and germinated in the spring. The prior garden had a bunch of the small yellow tomatoes I mean hundreds of these yellow tomatoes. Now I must admit I might be a tiny bit rigid in my preferences but I think tomatoes are red. Sure yellow tomatoes and heirloom tomatoes are tasty but they just don’t fit my perception of a tomato. Again these plants must have been turned into the garden beds because they have popped up all over.

So Maggie and I harvested a bucket of yellow tomatoes yesterday and have given them away to our local food bank. Then we have pulled out the plants by the root. It has been amazing how long the roots are. I am going to place all of these plants in our burn barrel and get rid of the plants.

We have pulled out another raised bed full of these yellow tomatoes, we had to be careful pulling the roots because this is our asparagus bed and we didn’t want to disrupt the asparagus plants. This bed has given 5 ½ pounds of these little tomatoes, mostly green that we will feed to our chickens.

Use the comments to tell us your gardening story of a volunteer plant.