Tomatoes - still green, look like plums
Cosmos - 4' tall and flowering now
Sunflowers - mixed colors - 5-7' tall
California poppies
Purslane (wild)

From beds that were tilled under in the fall!

I love volunteers!

puslane
red russian kale
chamomile
alyssum
radish
lettuce
onion
tomato
butternut squash!
dill
parsley

And yes! I love letting things go to seed!

What ... what .... WHAT is purslane? I've never heard of this before!

Mint (shocking, I know :) !)
Horseradish (it is now well contained in a buried 5g bucket)
Lettuce (gophers got to it before I was able to harvest...)
Cilantro (never a disappointment to get more cilantro...)
Carrots (didn't realize I had left some last year...)

I have a tomato plant that's popped up in an expansion joint between my foundation and sidewalk. I have no idea how the seed got there - clear on the other side of the property from my garden, with the garage in between. I'm curious how big it'll get growing through that 1" space in the cement.

German thyme.

Borage (look it up), onions, lettuce, chard, lupines, buddleias. Oh, and poison ivy :(

Carol

Parsley - but it didn't get big enough to use from before it went to seed. I just left it in case we had any swallowtail butterfly caterpillars (we didn't.) Mint - um, yeah - why can't watermelons grow that well LOL! We keep grubbing it out and it pops up in other places. And oddly enough, portulaca (I know, not a veggie, but it was in a POT and I didn't buy any this year so it had to have come from last year's plants. And I even dumped more potting soil in that pot this spring to plant something else into!!)

There is a miniature squash plant growing underneath a krim tomato... looks like a tiny winter squash, leaves smaller than teacups, flowers the size of your thumbnail. Last year, someone gave me a giant rotten pumpkin for my compost heap, so it would be funny if this was the offspring. Maybe it will grow giant pumpkins the size of thimbles!

Purslane is like Portulaca. Some Purslane is grown to eat. I had a white flowering Vinca sprout in a pot of sterile potting soil. I've never grown it before!

Vinca...don't let it get started...you'll be sorry

An addendum to my earlier post:

I found some sort of cucurb (squash, cucumber?) growing in my strawberries this afternoon. It has smaller leaves, yellow flowers and a tendril on it. No idea...

Before we bought a compost bin this year we just had a pile (lots of leaves). I posted before about some kind of cucurb in it. Turns out we have at least 3 different kinds - a striped green and yellow gourd or squash (2 fruits now), a patty pan squash (2 fruits), and something that looks right now like a miniature pumpkin (1 fruit). Plus one that I transplanted to the garden and has lots of flowers but no fruit yet. I had bought a whole basket (almost a bushel) of mixed gourds/squash for $3 at Wmart last fall for decoration, threw them all in the pile in December. Plants are spreading across the hillside behind the garden now.

Also had a lot of tomato volunteers from the new compost bin. I planted a couple in pots, 1 has flowers so we'll see what comes up. Hope they're Campari and not the tasteless grape tomatoes that started getting wrinkly b/c no one wanted to eat them!

I also can't explain this - I planted various kinds of indeterminate tomatoes in trenches with a trellis, trying to keep 1 or 2 varieties at most in each row. Yellow pear tomatoes seemed to have lots of root suckers coming up. But after a while I noticed RL volunteers that look exactly like the pear tomato babies coming up in my other rows with my PL heirlooms (and my Speckled Roman pastes and cherries which are RL but a much more delicate leaf)! Definitely tomatoes, not weeds, b/c when you rub the leaves your fingers have that lovely "tomato plant smell". I imagine these have to be root suckers from the transplants, but I have no idea why the leaves look different from the parents. I left some of them to see what happens.

Oh, I forgot - not this year, but something like 10 years ago, at our old house, DH spread some compost and ended up with 2 melon plants. One had fruit that looked like a cantaloupe but was green inside, the other looked like a honeydew (I think there might have been a *little* webbing) but was orange inside. The green melon we dubbed a "canta-dew" was delicious, but the "honey-loupe" was awful! Maybe that was a honeydew-pumpkin cross?

I have a lot of volunteer tomatoes where I work. But I couldn't eat them! I am an electrician for the sewer company....

Yesterday morning, I had to get in a boat and paddle out on a sewer pond to check out an aerator. It is a floating motor with a propeller that stirs the umm, crap is safe to say I guess.

It had a huge tomato plant with perfectly formed, 4 inch diameter, ripe tomatoes on it, in the crap on top!

I have found a lot of huge volunteers, of all kind of different veggies growing around our sewer facilities over the years.

I pulled a carrot that was about a foot long, huge peppers, squash, kale, turnips, and so on.

If only they were safe to eat! Providing I could get past the ewwww factor!

I have what looks like some kind of burgess buttercup squash but the leaves are enormous. It's got flowers and teeny fruit but I have no idea. Lots of stuff in my compost. Several curcubits, some that look like melons, some that look like cukes. Oh, and the thing I have that's weird to me is a yellow ground cherry tomato plant sort of winding its way down the side of my raised bed. Dang that thing is hardy. Lots of little tomato plants, probably the yellow pears because I got lots of those last year. I let them grow but was pretty disappointed in the fruit---tasted just blah. Next year should be interesting because about 90 percent of what I planted was open pollinated/heirloom so I guess most should turn out ok. Assuming it 'volunteers' somewhere that I can afford to have it take up space. :)

Angie

wertach - how hmmmm - facinating.... :^:

Carol - why should I look up borage?

I never had any problem with vincas taking over and I used to live farther south in central Florida. It brought back a happy memory of an old friend that has been gone for several years now. I think I would grow them even if they were invasive just to smile and think of her!

I had probably 50 tomato volunteers and left several to hedge my bets against the blight ripping through my planted tomatoes. Many have ripened by now.

Two seem like straight Black Prince, one seems like a Black Prince/Better Boy hybrid (they look like bigger black prince while ripening, but when fully ripe they get red and lose the black tomato coloration), three are probably some kind of pear/sweet 100 hybrid (I only grew yellow pear but these are pear shaped with red color)and one plant is growing tomatoes that are long like little carrots and rot off the vine before they ripen.

I also had two melons volunteer and they both seem to be cantaloupe, though we haven't harvested our first yet.

I'm wondering whether my volunteer tomatoes (some sort of miniature plum) are going to ripen before the transplants do.

every year I have lots of volunteer tomatillos. Waaay too many. THis year, I have some sage, tomatos, squash Russian sage,zinnias and heliopsis. I love volunteers, but had to start pulling the tomatillos, as they were taking over.