Yardening

One of the many rules of lazy gardening is that you don’t throw away free plants. One of my favorite things to do is plant one or two of something I like and let it go to seed so that it will plant itself in abundance. It takes patience, true, and usually a year at minimum (some seeds take up to 7 years to sprout!). But it’s extremely satisfying to me when plants pop up without my assistance. Native plants also make this easier, of course.

One of the risks with letting a plant reseed itself is that you don’t always know what is coming up and you can accidentally pull up what you thought was a weed (aka something you didn’t want to grow in a particular spot), but was actually a plant you were hoping for.

This spring, I was hoping that some of the rotten tomatoes I had tossed into an empty raised bed would seed themselves and I would get more of the amazing slicers that we grew last year.

Yay! I got what I wanted. Or so I thought. These tomatoes came up in April, and there were many more that sprouted too. I gave away almost 20 plants, feeling so happy that everyone would get to enjoy these amazing tomatoes.

Fast forward to July. The plants are huge and producing many tomatoes. Then they start to turn red. But the tomatoes are all very small. Was this a consequence of all the heat and no rain that was June this year? Nope. Turns out that the tomatoes I wanted to reseed themselves were engineered to be sterile, so that you couldn’t save seeds. These volunteer tomato plants were the cherry tomatoes that no one would eat because they didn’t stay firm more than a day. Well, that’s not true. Someone did eat them. The birds. The birds ate them and shat them into the garden, the little buggers. All of my volunteers were cherry tomatoes. So, I removed two and ran to our local garden center to see if there were any larger tomato babies left.

Luckily, I guess, there were some leggy leftovers. I have no idea if I’ll get any kind of crop out of them this year. I seriously doubt they’ll have time to super produce so we can jar 40 quarts of marinara again. Not to mention the death of the tomato sandwich dreams I’ve been having for the last month.

What did I learn from this experience, you might wonder. I learned that seed companies are greedy little buggers. I learned to trust my instincts about plant identification. I learned that volunteers are not always welcome.

I also learned that plans change, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Now I have an empty bed that I can start more fall crops in. Maybe I’ll have a bumper crop of cabbage instead. At least I’ll know what’s growing with a seed packet as proof. 😜