It seems everyone wants to vegetable garden this year. With rising fuel prices people are staying close to home. With rising food prices, homeowners are thinking perhaps raising a little of their own vegetables and fruits would be a good idea to offset the cost of living. Plus, with concerns about global warming, reducing our carbon footprint, and the safety of our food supply, growing a veggie garden just makes perfect sense.
Most vegetable gardeners, including myself, carefully plan out the garden with neat rows or raised beds filled with just the right varieties of vegetables we want. However, Mother Nature always seems to have a few tricks up her sleeve. One trick I particularly like is the random self-sown vegetable. If you’ve been gardening in the same location for a number of years you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about. These are seedlings that just pop up on their own in spring and summer all over the garden. They are the remnants of last year’s fruits and vegetables. Tomato seedlings in the rows of spinach, lettuce sprouting in the squash patch, random squash plants in the beans. For years I would just yank out these intruders because they didn’t ‘fit with my plan for the vegetable garden’. However, in the past few years I’ve been working with, as opposed to against, nature. I’ve become more selective about tearing out any plant that sprouts in a place I hadn’t planned, with surprising results.
Now I let some of these self-sowers stay and get good yields from plants I had nothing to do with planting. I usually let a few ground cherries sprout up and they produce delicious cherry tomato sized fruits with a sweet and tangy flavor. If you let your lettuce go to seed, it will pop up everywhere next spring. I transplant the seedlings into beds or between broccoli and eggplant. I even let a tomato sprout survive last year and it eventually produced some cherry tomatoes. It wasn’t the most vigorous plant and didn’t produce many fruits, but it was fun. Cilantro loves to come back on its own so plant it one year and it’s in your garden forever. However, squashes and pumpkins are always a gamble because they cross so freely. You never know what kind of fruit you’ll get from a self-sown cucurbit.
Some of my free plants aren’t traditional vegetables at all. I let lamb’s quarters, dandelions, and pigweed sprout in the vegetable garden. I pick the young, tender leaves and tops of these vegetables. They make great spring and early summer greens for salads and add a zip to my stir-fries. Of course, you do need to keep them in bounds or they will truly become a weed.
However, you can’t rely totally on self-sown vegetables. They tend not to be as productive and may harbor some diseases. But have some fun in the garden and let a few grow. You’ll be amazed at what plants you can get for free.