Sometimes, all you need to do is steer while nature drives.
Or, as in the case of these cantaloupe seedlings, splatter a rotten cantaloupe across the ground and wait.
You can see us planting these cantaloupes in a recent video where Rachel and I decided to see how crazy we could get with scattered seeds.
You always get the best pumpkins, melons and tomatoes from your compost pile. They seem to like to sit in the remnants of the previous year’s rotting fruit.
Take this pumpkin growing on our fence.
We didn’t plant that. All I did was spot the little seedling there and make sure I missed it with the string trimmer. I have no idea what kind of pumpkin this is. It looks different than the tropical pumpkin leaves I’ve seen. We had nothing to do with it. My guess is that the previous tenants fed the guts of a pumpkin to their chickens some time last year… and then the rainy season awakened one of those seeds.
Since we’re on the topic of serendipity, I was given some yard long been seeds by a friend. Since I injured my hand before I could finish the bean trellis, two of my sons finished it for me and then planted the seeds. They have already started coming up and look beautiful.
Beside the bamboo bean trellis, the second generation of purple podded Roma beans are also emerging.
Our pastor also gave us some Malabar spinach cuttings and their vines are reaching for the sky.
Quite a beautiful vegetable.
One final bit of fun: if you have read my book Grow or Die: The Good Guide to Survival Gardening, you probably remember the appendix on planting a garden from your pantry.
Just for the heck of it, I’ve decided to demonstrate this idea in one of our garden beds.
To do so, I bought a 13 bean soup mix which is basically a bag of dried beans with a seasoning packet. I’m going to plant them all in a garden bed soon… and create The 13 Bean Soup Garden!
Why not? My luck has held so far.
Except with a machete.
You can have greener thumbs by this weekend!
6 comments
Yes, volunteer seedlings can yield pleasant surprises – but not always. Many modern fruits and vegetables are hybrids – nothing wrong with that. But they are usually not true to seed, so you can get just about anything from a volunteer seedling – ranging from very good to very bad. I had a luffa vine from a volunteer seedling a few years ago, also volunteer watermelons.
The fancifully-named “Everglades tomato” was almost certainly a volunteer seedling, and probably not passed down by native tribes, but almost surely a seedling from the era when sewage sludge was used as fertilizer. [Tomato seeds survive in sewage sludge.] “Everglades tomato” sounds better than “sewage tomato”.
Tomatoes are really easy. Just squash the rotten ones and they grow back the next year. The only problem is they will take over the entire garden if you don’t thin them back. Same with sunflowers, grow back really easily. I even got a bunch of tobacco grow back this year. That’s a first. Lots of things will grow back if given the chance.
My peaches and apple trees are also from tossing pits/rotten apples into the garden.
Yes, perfect.
Yes, sewage tomato does not sound good. I have had good results even with the next generation after a hybrid. One year we had an incredible acorn/spaghetti squash cross. Wish I had saved the seeds.
I can’t believe you wear those sandals to work in your yard. I live in Crystal River and I always wear closed-toed shoes and long pants-a painful lesson learned : /
Barefoot, too, sometimes. But the fire ants usually persuade me to stop.
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