There are many types of volunteers. My favorite are volunteer plants! Plants that go to seed and over winter and then pop up all on their own in the spring are called volunteers. There are several reasons why volunteers are awesome. The first is, they can tell you that your soil is ready to plant! When a seed decides to germinate it means that you can determine that the family of plants in that same type can be planted. Volunteers can also give you an indication of the soil types that plants love. The best reason to love volunteers is that these plants are hardy in your zone. You should get better more resilient plants with volunteers.

I am a very lazy gardener. I like to sprinkle things around rather than cultivate clean rows. Volunteers allow the garden to get full with less work.

Sometimes, volunteers are bad. In a world of hybrid and genetic modification, you can get a non fruit berring variety, or even another plant altogether. Did you know, that potatoes and tomatoes are in the same family? Yeah, crazy, right? Potatoes can sometimes grow fruit that looks very much like a tomato. Please don’t eat them though. The small cherry tomato size fruit sometimes seen on potatoes are not good to eat and may even be poisonous in large quantities. Another variety of volunteer that probably isnt helpful are pepper plants. Peppers hybrid very quickly. An important gardening tip is do not plant sweet peppers, like bell peppers, near and I mean like within 40 feet or more, of a hot pepper. These peppers will produce a first round well, the next harvest may be elongated and will lose the sweetness. My experience is that they may actually become HOT. Similarly, if you see a pepper volunteer in the spring, it will likely be some crazy variety of unknown sweetness or hotness. I have had occasion to have some very good habenaroes volunteer several years in a row. So sometimes, if you have space, try it out and you may be surprised!

This year in my garden I have sunflowers, cilantro, and beans volunteering. I also have some good forage ground cover like chickweed, henbit, and a few others. The weather has been so crazy I have had some tomatoes pop up and then die back, but I think we are through that now. Happy volunteering! And good Luck!