DIY Foodie

I really love my compost pile. Sure, I love that, instead of going to the landfill, my grapefruit peels and moldy bread are turning into nutrient-rich compost in my backyard. Sure, I love that that compost will provide organic, nutrient-rich food for my garden. But what I really love are volunteers...

“Volunteer” is the word farmers and gardeners use for plants that weren’t intentionally planted but came up anyway. (One farm I visited was covered in tomato plant volunteers, courtesy of some undigested seeds in their pigs’ manure.) With all the seeds I throw out from cooking, I have had a lot of volunteers recently. Thus far, 2 tomato plants, 4 potato plants, 4 onions, 1 corn stalk, and about 45 pumpkin plants have volunteered for duty.

Their are only 2 problems with volunteers. One is that they usually don’t know what season it is. So if you eat tomatoes in December, and your volunteers come up in January, they’re not going to make it past the first freeze… which is exactly what happened to my two tomato plants.

The second problem is that, since you don’t intentionally plant them, there’s no 100% sure way to tell exactly what’s growing. I thought my corn plant was an onion for at least the first month. The picture above shows some of the many pumpkin plants growing in my compost pile, with some member of the brassica family growing on the left. However, I have no idea exactly what it is. In fact, I’m only making an educated guess on the pumpkins, from looking at lots of photos online (and the fact that I ate a LOT of pumpkin this fall). I’ll let you know if a melon pops out instead!