Generally, I "winter sow" tomato seeds outside in April, in plastic containers with lots of holes and seed starting mix. I practically obsess over them. Most of them germinated in the last 10 days or so. I encourage, coax, and plead with them to get their first true leaves. Only a handful of the pampered divas have gotten true leaves yet.

Otoh, most of the volunteers in the garden have not only popped up in the last few days, but many of them either already have true leaves or are starting to get them. What's up with that? It doesn't seem fair. The intentional seedlings should be ashamed of themselves. :-)

So I was taking inventory -- here's where Cherokee Purple was last year, and Aker's West Virginia, and Bloody Butcher, and Pineapple over there. Of course, there's no guarantee that a fruit wasn't moved from one spot to another, and therefore, for example, a CP could have sown where Bloody Butcher was. It's a bit of a crapshoot.

Naturally, I want to save every single one, just to see how they might turn out, but that's impractical. Would you save any or just write them off?

Thanks!

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 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

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

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

I always over do things lol

Karen

******

I don't think it's homespun lure at all.

As long as folks recognize that volunteers, whether from OP or hybrid varieties can't be assumed to be correct for a specific variety, then I do think if someone has the room it is great fun to transfer and plant a few,

As I said above, sometimes a volunteer will be an F1 hybrid from natural crossing and if the F1 is looking good, then one can dehybridize it by making selections and take it out a few years to genetically stabilize it to an OP.

About 90% of the OP heirloom varieties we have today arose in such a manner, the other maybe 10% by mutation from a preexisting variety.

As for Sungold F1, the usual volunteers that one will get will be red fruited since a red currant variety ( S. pimpinellifolium) is used in breeding most flat truss F1 cherry varieties.

There are some very good Sungold OP's out there, Reinhard Kraft in Germany has released 4 of them, the latest being Big Sungold Select, which is pretty darn good. This summer I'm growing another one, not Reinhard's, called Ambrosia.

So, as has been said from the get go in this thread, if someone has the space and the interest to take a look at some volunteers I think that's just great IMO b/c it can't be predicted what might turn up which could be something great or something lousy, and to me and I think quite a few others, that's the challenge and fun of it.

Carolyn

T

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

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.

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*)

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.

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.

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.

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?

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....