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.

Maybe some sort of Physalis ? Here is a link that might be useful: Physalis

Glenda, The folks I know who've either had Black Cherry reseed and volunteer, or who've saved seeds and planted them, seem to have gotten true Black Cherry plants so I think it is likely you will as well. Most tomatoes reseed pretty easily but if you grow a lot of tomato varieties, you have no idea which ones reseeded until they form fruit. I pull out volunteers and toss them on the compost pile because I don't want to give space to a plant when I don't know what it is. Susan, it is usually the small, bite-sized tomatoes that reseed most easily and that's because it is easy to drop one and lose it in the mulch or the foliage of companion plants. So, it sits there and rots, and then the seeds come up the next year. With larger tomatoes, if you drop one, you tend to see the fruit and pick them up. Sometimes I get tomato plants in the compost pile, especially because I dump the seeds there after my tomato strainer removes them when I'm making sauce. Based on how many tomato seeds and pepper seeds I dumped there last year while canning, I ought to have huge numbers of volunteers in my pasture compost pile, but it is furthest from the house and full of snakes so I don't even stand there and look at it. I just walk back there, heave the contents of the compost bucket onto it, and scurry back to the house before I find a snake or something worse. Last year, a bobcat hung around that compost pile a lot. I hope Jess has an easy labor to make up for the difficult pregnancy and that little Charly or Sophia makes her grand debut soon. I bet Kenna is excited about becoming a big sister! Beth, Throw a handful of ripe cherry tomatoes somewhere that you DON'T want to grow tomatoes and I guarantee you they'll come up in that spot just so you have to dig them up and move them someplace else. Dawn

They may well be treated for insects, but otherwise still viable. Just BTW my mother, who grew into an avid gardener, said when she and dad married and moved into there first house, she so badly wanted a veggie garden. Having no knowledge of such, she bought a packet of dried peas and soaked them overnight before planting them. LOL. Post WW2 depression days it was probably pretty expensive compost. I love it that we never stop learning. And nothing puts us off trying.