The Accidental Gardener

It seems to me, that I somehow manage to do all my best gardening by accident. Every year I plant vegetables and flowers in small gardens around my yard and experience some amount of success with these gardens. However, also every year, I always seem to manage to have plants I didn't intend to grow, or at least not in there present location, and I'm not referring to weeds, per se.

My first experience with "volunteer" plants was in my front flower garden. I had planted Vinca and Petunias and they grew relatively well. Then the following year, before I planted anything, small Vinca seedlings started to emerge from seeds that the plants had dropped the year before. This was nice, because I didn't have to buy seeds or plants and the volunteer flowers filled in nicely.

However, mixed in with the Vinca seedlings were small tomato seedlings. I had planted tomatoes in a vegetable garden in the back yard the year before and apparently some seeds were transferred from the compost pile to the flower garden. I transplanted some to the tomato plants, but more began to emerge, so I just left them. The tomato plants that grew in my flower garden that year were healthier and produced more than either the ones I transplanted or the ones I purchased at Wal-Mart and planted. So thus, I had tomato plant "weeds" in my volunteer flower garden that year (and every year since).

The next year, I had volunteer potato plants in my vegetable garden. Again I am crediting the compost pile (obviously I don't know how to properly compost). I had never planted potatoes, but had thrown potato peels in the compost. The potatoes, too, produced well as "weeds" in my vegetable garden. The carrots and radishes I planted, however, never even came up.

Now this year, I've had a new volunteer (weed) vegetable to come up in yet a different location. This however, is NOT due to my faulty composting skills. For 3 years I had planted watermelons in the vegetable garden and never produced a single edible watermelon. Even this year, my youngest son carefully planted a watermelon seed in the vegetable garden next to the cucumber plants (which didn't amount to anything, btw). That watermelon seed never even sprouted. However, over in the flower garden next to the swimming pool, a watermelon seed, which was apparently dropped between the cement sidewalk and the concrete edging of the flower garden when someone was eating watermelon, sprouted. While we were out of town for about a week, the seedling grew. When we returned home, we found that we had a thriving watermelon plant growing on our pool deck, partially in the flower bed, partially on the sidewalk. At that point we figured we would let it grow and see what happened. Eventually it filled the flower garden (approx. 4' x 24'), covered half the sidewalk between the garden and the pool and began to grow through the fence. It also produced ten good-sized watermelons.

So, for some reason it seems, the flowers the children give me for Mother's Day die, the plants that I purposefully plant may or may not produce, but the plants that plant themselves thrive beyond belief. I guess I'm not really a gardener, just a caretaker for what ever God gives me. That seems to be the story of my life.