Each year I used to select 10 volunteers from my tomato field and transfer them to a side garden I had. Since I was growing several hundreds of tomato plants and varieties in that field I wasn't about to try and guess what I'd get but I knew what I should get as to specific known varieties.

I did it just as a challenge and it was fun. But many of them turned out to be crossed varieties so I never saved seeds and if I'd had the time and space to select a plant that had fruits that I liked I would have done that to dehybridize it and make selections out to the OP state.

But I never saw anything I thought was worth working with.

And yes, I did ID some volunteers as being a specific variety but never saved seeds from them b'c I only save seeds from labelled known plants b'c I SSE list them and also offer them in a free seed offer I do each year.

So what the heck, transfer as many as you have room for and see what you get.

Carolyn

I found cilantro and dill vounteers. I guess I did not catch the seeds last year :) I also wintersowed both..lol

I love volunteers, I can never have a heart to pull them. I had a tomato volunteer in a flower bed. I assume the seeds came from an animal or something. I left it and it never had a tomato :(

Karen

Here's another twist on it. What tomato that you grew last year did you like the least? Especially if you said, "I won't waste space for that one again." If you pick "X" volunteer plants from different areas of the garden, they will all be the one you'd opt not to grow again. I'm pretty sure it is some tomato corollary of "Murphy's Law." (VBG)

If you have the room, why not try it? I usually have too many plants of the ones I want to grow, so I wouldn't. Interestingly, I've never found a volunteer in my garden. Either we're pretty good at getting all the tomatoes, or I don't see them before we plow or till.

Betsy

Yes, these are fantastic ideas. I will take two from each group and see what happens.

Carolyn, it sounds like an adventure combined with a treasure hunt. I'm convinced.

Hey, Karandee, volunteers are fun and I hate to weed them out. I just don't have the real estate to support hundreds of tomato plants plus the ones we want to try this year (plus all the other things to be grown). Last year, however, we got more butternut squash than we could handle because we threw a few unused squash in the compost pile the year before. Enjoy that dill and cilantro.

Bets, I'll try it. The Murphy's Law bit is funny and perhaps likely, but what the heck. Worst case scenario -- Sungold x Pineapple.

I love Sungold but it's part tomato, part weed, and part brutish traveler - it gets everywhere. Pineapple was pretty and okay tasting, but we're trying Lucky Cross instead this year. If Murphy is running amok here, that's probably what we'll get. :-)

Thanks, folks.

I understand...I need to pull volunteers too. It is hard to do though. Since I had a tomato last year I did not pull do very poorly it will be easier this year.

I have so many plants I am squeezing some wintersown tomatoes in the back of some flower beds :)

I always over do things lol

Karen

My first year with a garden, one of the tomato plants I purchased was a Sungold. Mind, I had no idea what a hybrid was at that time. When the next year rolled around I had volunteers EVERYWHERE, like, hundreds. I didn't have the heart to just pull & throw them out so I put the little guys in the flats I had from some flowers. After they grew bigger I took them into work & left them in the breakroom with a printout 'Free to good home" & describing Sungold... Luckily no one ever confronted me about the 'mutant' tomatoes they probably got from those volunteers. After that, cute or not the little guys were pulled & composted. ;)

DO NOT be drawn in by the homespun lure of volunteer tomatoes unless you planted non-hybrid seed... hybrid volunteers will take up space and yield little or nothing.

Last year I grateful adopted all of the volunteer tomatoes that showed up and had a dismal year as far as tomato production went. This year I greeted any and all volunteers with the same "OFF WITH THEIR HEADS!" enthusiasm.

Hi Lionheart, Keep in mind that Ma Nature sowed her seeds before you did. She always wins ;-) Each year I usually set aside a row in the garden for the hardiest of the hardies and then hoe out the rest. Yesterday I hoed out many.

T

PS, stop pampering and fussing over your WS flats ;-O

I had a few volunteers come up in my leaf pile. I figured they were from the store bought tomatoes that I mostly hate. I drove a stake or two in the ground next to a few. Yanked the rest. I got some very sweet plum type tomatoes! I saved the seed and scattered them in a little spot two weeks ago and they are coming up. I'll let you know what I get!

I have been cultivating volunteers for some years now. Each year I say I will track where I spread last years seeds so I will have 'some' idea what they will be but fail miserably.

Some things I have learned -
If you move them the will be stunted.
If you leave them where they are they need less watering and are much more tolerant of drought. The root systems are obviously better established than transplants.

The moral is - if the volunteers start in beds and you can leave them they will do much better.

The down side is they usually germinate later in the season.

fwiw - I have planted/grown 16 tomato plants each 1ft apart in a 4x4ft bed. Lightly pruned (cuz I am lazy?) and trellised up a string(s). Sure it was crowded and required lots 'n lots of water but it did work.

"Keep in mind that Ma Nature sowed her seeds before you did. She always wins ;-)"

LOL, Trudi, if I could be sure that I wouldn't get any volunteers that would confuse the process, I would directly sow the desired varieties into the garden every year and bypass the "wimpy diva" stage. :-)

I reviewed the troops last night. Those volunteers are growing unchecked like they're on steroids. Much bigger, with far more true leaves, than the coddled wimp brigade.

The pouters, on the other hand, are just sitting there like they don't know what to do. They've made very little progress. I gave them a stern talking-to yesterday evening. :-)

"PS, stop pampering and fussing over your WS flats ;-O"

That would require fighting against Gardening OCD, but okay. (*wink*)

"The moral is - if the volunteers start in beds and you can leave them they will do much better."

Hi, gumby. I can leave a couple where they germinated; one in the northwest corner, the other in the southeast corner. I'll move the others. The "stayers" will be somewhat of a control group.

Then I'll take another from the northwest and another from the southeast, move them, and compare notes.

If it stops raining this weekend, we are going to break some new garden ground, so I'm going to try to direct sow some seeds that are the same as the started varieties and compare notes. And, I've actually ordered some plants as a back up, so there will be at least one variety that will have 3 starting points [seed, seedling, 12+ inch plant], even though the plant that was ordered will not be from the same seed batch.

Of course, all of that has nothing to do with the volunteers, but curiosity has the best of me now. :-)

"I saved the seed and scattered them in a little spot two weeks ago and they are coming up. I'll let you know what I get!"

Putting on a Forrest Gump accent: "...you never know what you're going to get."

Yes, let us know what happens. I'll try to remember to come back with an update too.

Lionheart, to me garden is one huge experiment after another, each year we get a little better. I can't wait to hear how you make out.

I'm letting a couple volunteers grow for a little while. I don't really have the space to indulge them but am curious how volunteers stack up against coddled little seedlings in our CA climate. I've heard that direct sown seeds are stronger than coddled seedlings in the long run. Although that may be true, I'm figuring production wouldn't be as good since my coddled seedlings are now 2 foot plants and the volunteers are a couple inches. I know the volunteers are from Sungold so the fun will just be in seeing how much stronger the plants are or aren't.

I kept three volunteers last year. Two granny Smith which turned out more robust and more productive than their parents. The third one I thought was a Sungold. It turned out to be nothing I've planted and only produced two unknown fruits. Because space and water are so precious and I plant so many confusing varieties, I think I will rely on starting from seeds from now on.

One spring I found a volunteer tomato growing in a crack in my patio. It lived a while, but hubby thought it looked like a weed and pulled it. Darn that man!

Lionheart I am eager to hear how you made out with your volunteer experiment?

New year, same story.
Anyone else fighting the urge to keep all or at least some of them? I think mine are mostly cherrys that I was not too fond of, but the rest of my family loved them. One of the plants got split during a storm, and I think that's where the seeds came from. maybe.
The ones in the past that I have kept have always done well by me. I have a plant label that says Mystery.

I containerize everything in my garden. I have separate containers for volunteer tomatoes. When I get a "bad" tomato on a plant I cut it in half, squeeze the seeds and pulp onto the soil of container and walk away. I always have volunteers that produce. I start a new volunteer container every 2-3 weeks so I have a constant supply of tomatoes all season and sometimes beyond. I know this doesn't answer your question but I appreciate being able to tell what I am learning.

I have hard time destroying them, but I think everytime I have kept them ,they ended up being some weird cross and produced like a large cherry tomato. This is odd because 90% of my plants are heirlooms.

When two varieties cross, the size of the F1 should be -- more or less -- the square root of the sum of the sizes of the parents.

So if the parents were 10 oz. and 1 oz., the F1 generation would be something along the lines of the square root of 11 oz.: i.e., a bit over 3 oz. [The same is true for fruit diameter.]

There are heirlooms of all sizes, including currants, small cherries and varieties not much larger than cherries.

Well mine have setting fruit like crazy, two are cherry types, and two are roma shaped, the most mature one is as big around as my thumb and about 3/4 as long. Whatever they turn out to be, there are a lot of them.

My brother had volunteers last year, someone put them in gallon pots & left them there. In early July he ask me to plant them, so I did. Had tomatoes after first frost, now I have volunteers from volunteers & I will plant them in a row.
I do not need them, but somewhere someone will not eat tonight, how can I waste food, when I have the space, time & compost to bear the fruit for free & give it away.

DH just mowed around the old tomato trellis from last year. I had started a compost pile (just chicken coop litter and some added sawdust) in a pit at the end of the trellis that I was planning on filling with better soil and growing melons in last year, but it was too wet. Pile covered with burlap (and I forget last time I turned it - maybe 3 weeks ago? Been busy).

He found about 10 volunteers growing along the edges (most along the edge near the trellis) and 2 on top in a gap in the burlap! Now, since I've turned the pile a few times, and manure came in after I had pulled all the sad remains of my drowned plants, all I can think is that these were from tomatoes that the chickens had eaten. I have to ask my cousin and uncle what they fed them - hopefully homegrown OP tomatoes, not hybrids (homegrown or storebought). Figured I'd just let them sprawl over the burlap - might end up with all foliage and no fruit since so much N.

So after reading this post friday, and then going out to work in the garden saturday, I found a handful of volunteers in the area where I planted zucchini this year. so I think I will leave them as they can grow up while the zuchs grow out? It will be fun to see what I get anyway. I think they might be San Marzanos I didn't eat toward the end of the season. Also I have a ton of watermelon vols. they are now in the area I am growing tomatoes this year, so I think I will let them branch out also. I really thought I cleaned up more than usual last season, but I guess not as much as I thought. I look at the volunteers as 'gifts' :)

Let them grow. The fun is that you never know what you will get. I have dozens coming up in a small plot in my fornt yard. I know for a fact some are Brandywine but the others are unknown. I have nothing against hybrids and have never had any volunteers that were not hands down better than your average grocery store tomato. Plus, volunteers tend to be nice, sturdy, bushy and stoic plants. Below is a picture of the coolest volunteer I ever met. It was growing near an MWR stage on Contingency Operating Base Basrah in 2010. They occasionally had catered functions there and a few seeds must have fallen on the ground. Somehow, this plant managed to survive in the scorching sand. This pic was taken in late March when temps were already too high to allow fruit set. Would have loved to bring it home with me but I figured it would be tough getting through customs. {{gwi:1335021}}

That is one tough volunteer! Jut think if it adapted enough to set fruit in those conditions. I should show that picture to my coddled little darlings and let them know how lucky they are!

I'm not a tomato connoisseur and where I live you can get only "small" (meaning cherry) tomato seeds or "big" (slicing size) seeds from the garden center --we don't seem to have the myriad of varieties available elsewhere. That is ok with me as what I am interested in is food of any edible variety.

Last year I grew 7 cherry tomato plants from seed and got not enough produce for one person with them all combined. From the compost I've been cultivating I've gotten dozens of 'volunteers' -- there were some of the cherry tomatoes produced from last years' "crop" in there but many more cherry and 'big' tomato leavings I'd gotten from the store/vegetable stands tossed in there. The compost 'volunteer' seedlings are about 100 times more robust and healthy than the new cherry tomato plants I started from seed.

My question is essentially, what will give me more food -- the unknown variety of 'volunteers' that sprouted from the compost or the rather sickly, in comparison, cherry tomatoes I've started from seed?

Ok, I'm not sure if this is legal. But if it isn't, don't do it, or at least don't tell anyone I suggested it.

I get tons of volunteers a year, and they all seem to fruit pretty well. The tomatoes are strangely shaped, but taste ok.

Anyway, I was thinking, maybe it would be fun to transplant these to public spaces?!? Like, on the side of the road, or at the edge of a park. Then, it would be free tomatoes for everyone. Of course, I'm probably not 100% thinking this through....

My cherry volunteers let me down flat last year, I might leave one this year, but not like I have been.
Stealth planting, not sure how it would be illegal, but wear black and pick a moonless night. :)