Our garden always looks rather chaotic. I generally plant things in rows, but plants and seeds left over from the previous year always come up, not in the rows, making things look pretty haphazard. In the photo above, there is a row of potatoes on the right side and a row of lettuce on the left side. In between the rows are a couple of “volunteer” potato plants that came up unexpectedly. Obviously, last fall when I dug my potatoes, I missed some and they remained in the ground all winter and then when the weather warmed, up they came.
When I see volunteers, I usually just leave them to grow, thus the chaos. Actually that row of lettuce was all volunteers that came up in another section of the garden. I spotted them when they were still small and transplanted them into a row.
The poppies in the garden always spread a lot of seeds, so poppy plants come up all over the garden. I usually don’t weed them out, because I like the color their blooms add to the garden. The photo just below shows a couple of very healthy poppy plants that came up in the middle of my potato row.
The photo at the very bottom is my prized volunteer. It is a foxglove. A decade ago we had lots of foxgloves in our garden, and then we had a very wet summer that wiped them out and we hadn’t had any foxgloves since. Last fall when I was putting the garden to sleep, I noticed that a couple of small foxglove volunteers had come up, so I transplanted them where they wouldn’t be wiped by tilling. This year, one of them is flowering. The pale yellow flower is not as spectacularly beautiful as some of the ones we used to have, but I was happy just to see any foxglove flowers at all.
While volunteer plants do cause some chaos in the garden, to me they always seem like free gifts, so I generally let them grow.
You can see my paintings at: davidmarchant2.ca
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