I've been pulling volunteer seedlings from my former tomato beds all spring. Those beds are now my squash beds. I always like to let some volunteers grow just to see what I will get since all my tomatoes in the past were hybrid. Since I am growing a lot of heirlooms also this year, I simply don't have any place to transplant a volunteer.
This afternoon, I was looking at some small weeds I need to pull which are growing between the rabbit (chicken) wire at the bottom of my garden fence and the fence itself. The weeds looked familiar and on closer examination, I realized I was looking at about six, 10" tall tomato plants. They are spaced almost perfectly at 12". These are growing on hard pan, low quality, bare dirt, never cultivated, soil. They are as nice as any of the plants I have planted this year. The only tomato I can imagine they came from is a Juliet hybrid I grew last year about ten feet away. Since the Juliet is a hybrid, it will be interesting to see what comes from the volunteers. I've already noticed five plants are regular leaf, but one is potato leaf. I grew the Juliets in the same cages as some Better Boy hybrids. If they cross pollinated, I may have some really strange tomatoes this year. Interestingly, they planted themselves along a perfect trellis.
Ted
Interesting Volunteer Tomatoes!
Last edited by tedln on Tue Apr 27, 2010 9:34 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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gixxerific
- Super Green Thumb
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applestar wrote:How about hilling them up with some good compost?
They'll be the patentable cultivars of the future: Self-seeding! Finds perfect planting sites on their own! Self-spacing and self-trellising!
Either that or you have resident Garden Gnomes....
It just gets to me that I can spend weeks, bleach treating little seeds, germinating them in containers, up potting them waiting for just the right moment to plant them, sometimes watching them die from different problems, preparing the soil for them, and some little neighborhood, wild seed pops up and says let me show you how to do it.They also performed another service for me. I have been attempting to germinate some of the free seed that basically failed on my first attempt. I really didn't have a place to plant them if they do germinate. I noticed yesterday, they are germinating fine. The volunteers showed me a good place to plant the Sweet Caneros Pink seedlings. Now I only need to make a long narrow box along the fence for the volunteers and Caneros Pink with some compost in it.
Ted
