Volunteers

My approach to gardening might be considered lazy in some ways, but if you really look at the outcome I get twice the return for half the work.  I tend to allow some crops to bolt and go to seed.  This means that I can leave the crop in the bed to act as a natural mulch which deters weeds and as the plants deteriorate through the winter they often plant their seeds themselves.  Other crops just get missed at harvest time and stay in the ground for another season by accident.

One example is my finished dill and cilantro plants that I left standing in their bed last fall.  All winter long the wind blew and dispersed seeds from those plants across any bed that was downwind.  This year I won't have to plant any dill or cilantro anywhere in my garden.  The nearest beds have thousands of sprouts that got there with no extra effort on my part.  They do share the beds with my onion plantings so they will get turned back into the soil when I harvest those crops, but in the meantime they can add flavor to my meals and canned goods.  In my opinion some "weeds" are good, especially if you can eat them.

Another crop that has volunteered itself throughout the garden is lettuce.  I grew multiple varieties last year and when they bolted in the summer heat I let them.  By the time I started turning over those beds they had long ago released their tiny tufts of seed to the wind and planted themselves throughout the garden.  These volunteers may also be allowed to stay where ever they grow unless they begin to interfere with the actual crops that I had planned for that particular area.  I may not allow all of them to reach maturity again, but I think I will continue to have free salad for many more weeks to come.

Potatoes are something that I am still on the fence with when I see volunteers coming up.  I always seem to miss a few here and there and it seems as though once they are in a bed, they are likely to remain there.  I now have potatoes volunteering in the first bed they were planted in for the third year in a row.  I don't mind the extra potatoes, but the plants can get quite large and digging them out is sure to be disruptive to any other crop that they share the bed with.  I often think I will just let them go through the season and dig them out once the main crop has finished for the season, but I always seem to miss some even after I turn the beds over.  My main concern in leaving volunteers is attracting persistent pests to a bed.  I don't use any pesticides in my garden, so crop rotation is necessary to help with pest control.  If I keep allowing them to grow in the same bed year after year the pests might build up to uncontrollable numbers and I could lose my crop and all of my hard work.  For now my methods lean towards letting the potatoes stay.  If things start getting out of hand and I have potatoes coming up everywhere or lots of bugs I may rethink my idea, but I still can't complain about accidentally growing extra food for myself without really trying.

All in all I find that being a lazy gardener works for me.  I am OK with not having a tidy garden plot and actually enjoy the variety of things that manage to thrive despite my neglect.  I also love the fact that I will get to harvest things that I didn't have to plant myself which saves me plenty of time and energy.  I have a feeling that the more crops that I introduce to my garden the more volunteers will continue to show up.  Who knows, maybe someday I will be able to grow a garden that truly plants itself.