I am thankful for volunteer plants.
Or another way to say it is, "I am thankful for plants that seeded themselves from last year." When I find an unexpected plant, I tend to leave it alone whether or not it fits into my landscape plan. It seems when nature picks the place for a plant, it grows much better than when left to my hands.
Here are a few of my volunteer plants and for them I am thankful.
 |
| Birds are responsible for spreading a lot of seeds including this sunflower from our bird feeder. I'm looking forward to seeing it bloom. |
 |
| Next to the sunflower are basil plants which I had planted here last year. I have since thinned these a little and shared the extra plants with friends. |
 |
| On the other side of the basil is this single parsley plant that I planted last year. Even thought it's not a volunteer, it's remarkable all the same. It has gotten huge. That is a full size watering can for scale. I was going to trim it back to perhaps get more foliage instead of blooms, but we still have parsley in the freezer that we got from this plant last year so I just let it go to see how big it would get. |
 |
| Moving along to the other side of the parsley is a volunteer yellow cherry tomato plant. We had one here last year that produced very well. This one is already getting large. I'm hoping to soon find the best way to contain it. I had meant to stake it, but that ship has sailed. BTW, I did some weeding in this bed after I took the pictures. |
 |
| Moving onto another part of the yard to a bed we calling the lightning bed. We call it that because this is where a huge pine tree was until lightning blew it apart one day. Here we have a volunteer marigold surrounded by more basil. Don't know what kind of basil, but this is a milder one than is growing in the other bed. I had one basil plant in here last year that was an extra from a friend. From that one plant, volunteers are everywhere. Maybe the wind had something to do with it. |
 |
| There are also a couple of dill plants that came up among the basil. I planted a couple of volunteer dill plants in this bed last year from another part of the yard. We didn't get much dill because some creature enjoyed munching on it.. |
 |
| There is a volunteer tomato plant in the lightning bed, also. Last year, there was one tomato plant in this bed that was an extra someone had. It didn't do much because the deer kept munching on it when it would grow a little bit. This one has been munched on, also, but has recovered. Another tomato that needs some kind of control. And soon. |
 |
| More basil in the lightning bed. I have dug up and moved some of it to another flower bed just for the flowers and a treat for the bees. |
