The volunteer squash I was whining about the other day got transplanted.
Thank you for your comments. They helped me get over the wave of inertia that swept over me whenever I looked at it, which was all the time. It was right in the middle of the garden, and I couldn’t go anywhere without it giving me the “and what are you going to do about it?” look.
It’s in an entirely different part of the garden now, an eclectic part, a sort of Isle of the Misfit Plants. In the pic above around the squash are zinnias, baby peach trees, a bush bean that came with the shovelful of squash, some kind of salvia, a cherry tree, and part of an elderberry bush. And I think I just saw a leaf from a potato that I forgot and left in the ground last year, photobombing on the lower left. The errant squash should feel right at home here.
The squash seems to be alive. There are some larger leaf losses, but the little leaf growing tips look okay.
Just healthy enough for the squash bugs to move in and attack any day now.
Your comments on the volunteer squash post revealed I am not alone in my plight.
Now I want to know I am not the only one with a strange little spot filled with oddball plants. What have you got?
I happened upon your website when I googled volunteer plants in the garden. We thought we had watermelon plants but finally figured out they were pumpkin plants. We had a pumpkin carving party in the fall and the innards went into our compost bin. Unfortunately, it is way too early to plant pumpkins fo a fall harvest so we will pull up the plants to make room for our melons. We have never grown pumpkins so we will save one plant just o see how they grow.
I love your website.
I myself have never had any luck with volunteer plants other than onions (which get eaten mighty quickly around here!). They always come up looking great but don’t produce anything. So, unless it is, again, an onion, it gets tilled under when we get the garden ready for planting.
I have apparently stumbled upon an organic insect control that supposedly works on squash bugs. I’m testing it this year, so we’ll see. I have been around the garden bed long enough to be skeptical of their claim. It’s called Dead Bug by Bomide (?). I have always been under the impression that nothing short of a nuclear bomb would control the squash bugs, but it’s worth a shot.
Oooo, I don’t have an Isle of Misfit Plants, but now I want one. I have a bunch of willow trees rooting in a vase on my table that need to go somewhere, and baby peach trees that should go somewhere… maybe I’ll just till under a corner of the yard and that will be that.
I don’t have a home for volunteer plants, but I have a similar problem. I can’t be ruthless about leftover seedlings. Maybe after a few more years of gardening, I’ll build up a callus about that kind of thing, but this year, I just couldn’t toss all those tomato seedlings I started. I foisted off a few on friends and family, but the ones I had left, I actually dug out a new bed and planted. Now, in addition to the ones in my raised mbeds, I have a bed of them along the side of my deck. I think we just might be overrun by tomatoes this year. On the upside, my girls are really excited about using our own tomatoes to make ketchup in the summer.
We didn’t plant anything in our garden last year, but we had many, many volunteer plants coming up from the compost, we guessed all in the squash/pumpkin family. We harvested four HUGE pumpkins and 21 butternut squash from those plants! We had to harvest them a bit early because the “garden” had become overrun with squash bug eggs and babies and we just set fire to the lot of them. Yay, we annihilated thousands of those buggers, many of which would have over-wintered in our house!!! The pumpkins and squash were fine specimens.