volunteer
A noun
Often used attributively: an unsown plant or crop of vegetables or grain that comes up from old seeds either late in the season, after harvest, or before planting in the spring hence adverb volunteer = spontaneously.
1915 Dingus Word-List VA 192 = a plant growing without being purposely sown: “The volunteer oats was good.” 1957 Broaddus Vocab Estill Co Ky 83 volunteer crop = plants that come up the following year from seed dropped, or plants left standing at harvest time; volunteer onion = onion that keeps coming up every year. 1957 Combs Lg Sthn High: Word List 107= a vegetable or plant that has come up in a garden or field without having been planted or sown; that is, from seed or root that has lain there from the previous season. 1963 Miller Pigeon’s Roost (July) 25) The writer has mole beans growing in the garden again this year. But I don’t have to plant them anymore. They just come up volunteer.
B verb of a crop: to grow spontaneously after the first crop has been harvested.
1915 Dingus Word-List VA 192 = to grow as a “volunteer”: “So much wheat volunteered that I let it stand.” 2012 Blind Pig (Jan 11) We’ve got things blooming that should have been killed by a cold snap and/or shouldn’t be up till late spring for heaven sakes, theres’ a second crop of lettuce volunteering in the garden.
—Dictionary of Southern Appalachian English
I love to find volunteers in our garden. It absolutely amazes me that a seed can lay out all winter and then sprout when warm weather arrives and grow into a beautiful plant. Not just grow—but thrive!
Volunteers always do better than the plants I start and care for.
The volunteer winter squash that’s growing in our cucumbers is overflowing the bed and starting to creep along the ground. I’ve pulled a few pieces of it up and cut it back in a few places to give the cucumbers more sunshine but that pruning hasn’t hurt it one bit. The plant is already covered with little winter squash. Exactly what they will be remains to be seen. The seeds that volunteered must have been in the compost we topped the bed off with in early spring.
The tiny tommy-toe, Matt’s Cherry, is coming up in several places. It’s been many years since we planted it on purpose, but every summer since then it has blessed us by volunteering on its own.
Last summer we had the most prolific and tasty yellow tommy-toe volunteer in our beans out back and I was hoping it would come back this year. I even dropped a few tommy-toes on the ground to try and encourage it to and I think it worked. There’s a couple of tomatoes growing in that spot.
Our Malabar Spinach volunteers come up so thick from the previous year’s vines that I have to pull a lot of it up, but I’m thankful that we don’t have to worry about replanting it each year.
The dwarf sunflowers I planted last summer volunteered for this summer and are about to bloom. We have taller sunflowers here and there from where they’ve re-seeded themselves for several years.
I love the wonder and bounty of volunteers in the garden.
Last night’s video: How Long It Took To Build Our House & More Answers to Your Questions!
Tipper
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I always enjoy seeing volunteer plants come up. They are always the tough ones.
Esmé,
if you are on a pc, instead of typing the letter e, make sure your number lock is on, hold down the Alt key and type 0233. That puts the the accent mark over the e instead of after it. On a Mac hold option and type e then release option and type e again. Your name is French and means “beloved” or “esteemed”. If you are on some other operating system let me know and I will figure it out on it too.
If you want to spell your name in all caps it’s ESM followed by alt 0201. or on a Mac ESM, hold the option key and type e, release the option and type uppercase E. ESMÉ
I like your name Esmé and am sure you fit its description!
For years I had volunteer Tommy toes that were so good, but haven’t seen any this year.. it’s weird! I’m going to plant some Malabar spinach and see what happens!
Oh yes..I’m a Tennessee Volunteer fan
I love to get volunteers. We’ve had our cherry tomatoes volunteer for 2 years now. Sweet! I noticed yesterday, we have some potatoes volunteering this year! Have a great week!
Tipper, I thought of you and yesterday’s video of you and Matt eating grits and your comment about adding sugar to the grits. While eating my breakfast of grits, bacon, eggs and drinking a cup of Maxwell House coffee ( Folgers was not on sale) I realize I have became a backslider and disgrace to my southern heritage and up bringing. I was eating Instant Grits ( original, none of the flavored) and ready cooked bacon, my eggs were real although not organic or free range. Thank goodness I haven’t stooped so low as to commit the ultimate sin- eating sweet cornbread. Doing that will get you kicked out of the south. Check out Marsh Hen Mill, Edisto Beach, SC. He was a former coworker and Jack Brock was one of my best friends. This is in his story of how he got started.
Now I want to be as serious as I know how, I went to my doctor yesterday for my yearly physical and blood work. They saw some type of a “puffy knot “ on my collar bone right below my neck, they were very concerned about it, but until I have some test ran they don’t know for sure what it might be. Nymph Nodes were mentioned. I am very concerned, I had never noticed it. Please keep me in mind and say a prayer for me and that it will turn out to be nothing to be concerned about.
Randy, I will pray for you. Hopefully it is nothing serious.
Prayers said for this knot to be harmless , Randy
Maybe there is a ‘hidden’ secret in those volunteer plant. They don’t get all the attention as a seed that is deliberately planted, so become hardier – tougher and build their own defense system to deter and stand against pests and weather and temperatures and therefore thrive? I like The Wingmender’s comment about the ‘just show up’ volunteers = a deep calling of the heart to meet any need.
Life is an amazing thing. That a seed has the ability to sprout and grow into a new plant that produces after its own kind is a miraculous series of events. God made it that way in the beginning.
One little volunteer cucumber plant was all I saw before I put black landscape fabric around most of the hills. I was hoping my Cosmos flowers would reseed or volunteer this spring, but I don’t think they did. I have read that each flower head has twenty or more seeds. If the 100,000 seeds I planted last spring had reseeded 20 times or more, I would be one happy gardener surrounded by a sea of pink and red beauty.
In my past gardens I’ve had volunteer plants to grow, but they didn’t turn out so well. I had a lot of surprises with some of them that I didn’t like, so I started pulling them up. I have raised beds now and so far haven’t had any volunteers to grow. Then my beds are only two years old and I stopped composting directly in the soil like I use to do. I try to clean every thing up at the end of the growing season. I might in the future winters compost directly again in my raised beds, but I’ll be careful not to include any seeds. I do love flower volunteers and encourage them to grow in my garden. In past in ground gardens I didn’t like the vegetable volunteers that end up being some weird vegetable. I’ve had some that grew that didn’t taste good at all. I had many volunteer tomato plants and they were okay but not as big or productive, they just took up garden space, so that’s why I don’t let them grow anymore either.
Me to. I work around and keep most volunteers. Like you, I am impressed by them though their overwintering is of course how natural design has always worked. I have a “volunteer” (squirrel planted I suspect) black walnut at the west end of the garden that I am keeping though it will cost me growing light in the long run. Also, it puts juglone in the soil which keeps many things from growing underneath it. Still, I had been wanting a walnut tree. It just occurred to me last night that I do not know whether black walnut
requires pollen from another tree; that is, is not self-fertile. I’m going to look it up. Speaking of Volunteers, good morning to all you all Tennesseans.
Ron- it’s great to be a Tennessee Vol!
Ron be sure of what you ask for, I have 5 large black walnuts in my large yard and plenty of sprouts you or anyone else would be welcome too. I just cut them down. I do not think you need another tree for pollination. I often squirrel hunted with my Daddy, he always told to never pick a squirrel up until you knew it was graveyard dead. After watching squirrels crack open black walnuts you know you don’t want one to bite down on your hand. I can’t give the walnuts away each year.
Volunteer tommy toes came up for several years and then stopped. Now I have volunteer dahlias. In 2016 I bought a package of dahlia seeds and planted them in my flower garden in front of the house. They came up that spring and I had many pretty flowers. Since then, they have come up every spring and have been getting taller and taller with the prettiest colored flowers: red, yellow, white, light pink and dark pink. One red dahlia is growing near the water fountain that’s in the middle of the garden and is two feet high. I think it’s that big because of a sprinkling of water it gets from the fountain every day.
Sounds like volunteers whether plants or people are the best.
We’ve got tomato volunteers up in several places and some basil is growing where I planted it last year, but is surrounded by the dill I planted there this year.
We planted Malabar Spinach for the first time and it looks good but my sprawling Tromboncino Squash keeps creeping over it & I have to pull it back to give the spinach a chance. I also planted some of it in a hanging basket at the back porch yesterday and I hope that grows.
We don’t have any volunteers coming up in our garden this year. We actually had to replant our tomatoes due to a few unexpected cold nights we had. Everything is doing great now though. My little pumpkin patch is growing like crazy with all this rain and sunshine. I loved your video with Matt last evening answering questions. You two were a hoot!
Hi Tipper. I see where you remove some of the leaves of your squash just to make room. An article I read several years ago on people reporting poor squash yield led me to remove leaves which could be hiding the flowers. It was thought that bees weren’t seeing the flowers through the thick bounty of leaves so they passed over. I have been careful to remove leaves around the flowers ever since and there’s no shortage of squash in my garden. I passed the tip on to my cousin and he also had great results.
That sounds like a great idea. Might help avoid powdery mildew, too. I’ll try it this year.
I know this may be off the intended subject, but your comments about volunteer plants and veggies made me think . I run a small not for profit food program in north central Florida. Without volunteers we could not be effective. We are constantly search and advertise for volunteers. But , those folks who just show up without being asked are the best. They are the most fruitful and and the most dependable. They brighten the gardens of many lives. Most of them are planted by hearing about the need and just show up.
There would always be volunteer tomatoes to come up each year along the outside edge of the fence around our hog pen. For many years we would also have a few plants of citrons to come up as volunteers in our garden. Mother would always make preserves out of them. I think that is about all they were good for. A citron is a watermelon shaped melon that remains as hard as a rock, I have heard deer won’t even eat them, there were no deer in my area during the time we had these volunteers.
Randy, my 98 yr old Mom told me several times that when she was a child she & her siblings would steal what they thought were watermelons, but the joke was on them because they could not “bust” the watermelons. They couldn’t figure out what was wrong with the watermelons & was scared to ask their parents because they didn’t want them to know they had been stealing. Mom never could remember the name of the “melon.” I’m taking her to the Dr. this morning & will tell her.
Thank you SO much for your post this morning because now I know what they were & can tell my Mom.