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Post by daylilydude on Sept 18, 2017 3:46:51 GMT -5
Do you go ahead and grow the volunteer veggies that crop up sometimes... Do you transplant them... Leave them in place... Turn them under?
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Post by spike on Sept 18, 2017 8:05:53 GMT -5
Oh I grow them! I only had 2 weirdo tomato plants grow in an area I have never grown tomatoes! So I just let them go to see what they are!
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Post by paulf on Sept 18, 2017 9:18:04 GMT -5
They all get rouged out. There was one stray tomato this year that grew up inside a cage and got pretty big until it was discovered and pulled. Most everything else is covered by a thick layer of newspaper/straw mulch and doesn't have much chance to grow.
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Post by ladymarmalade on Sept 18, 2017 13:55:51 GMT -5
One year I let a whole garden bed get taken over by volunteer tomato plants. I was so excited to have them- and then I tasted them. Blech, they had sprouted from a grocery store tomato or something. Ever since then, I've been much more discriminatory about who gets to stay.
If a tomato comes up in a spot where there is currently nothing growing and I don't need the space, I am usually inclined to let it grow. This year I had a couple of tomato volunteers that ended up being delicious ones that I'd grown previously.
I actually LOOK for tomatillo plants to volunteer. They usually do, so I don't even start those from seed anymore- I just look for the volunteers to start coming up. Sometimes I let them grow where they came up, sometimes I transplant them, but this year I have half a dozen tomatillo plants, and I didn't have to sow a single seed.
Normally though, my standard M.O. is to just rip out the volunteers.
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Post by september on Sept 18, 2017 16:37:23 GMT -5
Volunteer dill, lettuce, bok choy all get to stay. I haven't had to plant dill seed in years. Tomatoes get removed if they are in the way. If nothing else needs to go in that spot, they might stay, but fruit has a tough time getting ripe. Sometimes I find a good size tomato volunteer after the sweet corn stalks are removed. If it looks healthy enough, I might dig it up to put in a pot for a fall greenhouse plant and hope to get a few late tomatoes. One year I eventually brought the plant in the house to ripen the tomatoes.
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Post by pepperhead212 on Sept 18, 2017 19:39:30 GMT -5
I use tomatillo volunteers all the time, but rarely use tomatoes, as I haven't had great luck with them, maybe because they were from hybrids. This year I planted one in a spot that something had eaten the original plant from, and, as usual, no great production, and no idea what type it is. I rarely get peppers, but right now I have a volunteer growing out of a crack in the concrete on one corner of my shed, and there are peppers on it! DSCF0304 by pepperhead212, on Flickr Many things I pull up as soon as they begin to bolt, so I never see any of those. Next year I will have huge numbers of tomato volunteers, as I have dropped countless split tomatoes (thanks to all the rain) on the ground, while keeping the good ones.
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