Oh, no, nothing. This year there is a potato plant in the middle of the broccoli bed, which was a potato bed last year. There are poppies blooming next to the tomatoes, in the garlic bed and by the okra because my loving hubby is kind enough to leave them where they come up, while every year asking "Can't you save the seed and plant it somewhere else?' and me answering, "I did, but they always bloom better where they selfsow." There are petunias in the strawberry bed and bush beans and cleome in the middle of the corn bed. And yesterday I looked at the container with the Bush Early Girl that I planted and I saw at least 6 newly sprouted tomatoes that came up in there after I added not-so-finished compost to the pot. I haven't seen zinnias and celosia in the main garden yet, but I will if this year is like every other one.

Yeah, but three days ago, I'd a swore in court that that tomato was really a green bean. One way or the other, that's ...disturbing.

Wbonesteel,It isn't disturbing....it is a garden's disease that we all have. We see things the way we imagined them, not necessarily the way they are. : ) I am sure this gardener's syndrome has a name, but I don't know what it is.

My garden is a big, casual informal cottage garden that turns into a jungle by early summer of every year. I really don't even attempt to control it, other than to pull unwanted plants. I like seeing how it evolves over the course of the season.I mix everything together and, with the help of Mother Nature, it all gets mixed together much more than I ever intended. It is all good though. I'd rather have plants I like come up where I never planned them or planted them than to have Johnson grass, bindweed, pigweed or lambsquarters popping up in the middle of the garden's raised beds.

With the large new garden out back giving me a place to sow some crops earlier (they used to be succession crops in the main garden, but now they can go in as early as the weather allows), I don't feel as pressured (by myself) to hurry up and get the cool-season crops out of there so I can put in succession sowings of warm-season crops. I have about 7 flats of warm-season herbs and flowers that I started from seed almost 3 weeks ago. As a cool season crop comes out, I pop in succession plants the same day. In the past, I would have been putting warm-season veggies in there, but since they already are pretty much planted in one of the three fenced garden plots, I'm getting to have more fun putting in lots more herbs and flowers than usual When I pull an onion to use it, I pop a little zinnia into the spot. Gradually the 5' wide by 45' long bed that has been filled with onions, cauliflower and brussels sprouts will be a long bed filled with zinnias, and with the long pop-up plants like verbena bonariensis, Laura Bush petunias and chamomile. In the past, I would have waited until the onions all came out at harvest time and then would have sowed southern peas into that bed. I'm looking forward to having more flowers this year. I cut back on them during the last two hot, dry summers and really missed them. I cannot grow many flowers in the beds around the house because the rabbits and deer eat them all so, increasingly, my flowers go into the fenced garden only.

Dorothy, I forgot about celosias. I do love having them pop up throughout the summer. One nice thing about them is that you only have to plant them once, and then you'll have them forever after.

Dawn

That's right, forever plants. I planted annual poppies when my youngest was in diapers. He's 29 now and I've had poppies ever since. I also have batchelor's buttons, larkspur, cleome, celosia, nigella, petunias and zinnias all selfseeding. And green beans and tomatoes as mentioned.

I'm not sure if the term "functional fixation" really applies to garden blindness, but it means not being able to approach a problem with new eyes, or see new uses for familiar items.

Part of being human is being subject to cognitive blindness and change blindness...but I thought I was immune. ;) So, it must be magic...or Ma Nature, or somethin' like that. The squirrels, mebbe... They do things like that!

Then, again, my wife plays some pretty nasty practical jokes from time to time...

Naw. Can't be change blindness or anything like that. Not me! It could be lots of things! (I'm gonna stick to that story, too.)

The way I feel about all the self-sowing volunteers is that I have to let at least some of them grow. So many plants struggle here in our hot, dry summers that it seems a shame to weed out the seedlings of plants that not only survive the summer but reseed freely.

Dorothy, I forgot to mention nicotiana and gomphrena, both of which self-sow freely. Oh, and pink evening primrose---not that having it growing and coming back is any sort of achievement. I think pink evening primrose would survive a nuclear war.

I love the reseeding poppies and larkspur mixed together. It always gives us a sort of red, white and blue look for Memorial Day weekend. Ours likely have peaked and are beginning to decline, and after they set seed, I'll eventually take them out and replace them with zinnias.

Two flowers that self-sowed for me for years were black-eyed susan vine and Texas hummingbird sage, but none reseeded in 2011 (no surprise there, given the extraordinary heat and drought) so we didn't have any that I can remember in 2012. I sowed new seed of both this year.

We stirred up a lot of trouble by taking out all the wooden edging from the raised beds, rototilling almost all the big garden soil (not the onion beds because they already were planted) together and rebuilding the beds in a new configuration. All that tilling of the soil exposed a lot of buried seeds to light and we are getting lots of surprises....mostly of the yank-them-up-and-remove-them type. However, we did get a lot of nicotianas so there's more of them, and more cleome as well, than we've had in recent years.

There's also a lot of new, tiny poppy plants popping up just now in random places, though the large poppies that started blooming weeks ago are about done. I'll leave the tiny poppy plants wherever they sprout and we'll get to have poppies later in the summer than usual.

I also have seen a handful of wildflowers we haven't had before. They are in an area where I sowed a wildflower mix last spring. It is fun to have something new to look at.

wbonesteel, I believe in garden magic, though sometimes it is more like black magic than green magic. I also think gnomes sneak into our gardens at night and move plants to places where we know that we never would have planted them. The only way to stop their mischievous behavior is to set humane gnome traps, catch them and release them in a wild area far from anyone's home or farm. I'm about to head out to the garden now to do some work in the cool morning air and, of course, to look at the plants and see what the garden gnomes did last night.

Dawn