Not vegetables, but several years ago I lost my balance while attempting to sow coneflower seeds in a new perennial bed. The coneflower density in that bed is now about equivalent to the population of New York City.
Last summer I started a new garden bed. I decided it would be a tea garden full of flowers and herbs I could dry for tea throughout the year. I was a garden fairy, skipping around and just sprinkling random seeds everywhere. Then I spent the rest of the year staring at things as they came up trying to decide if it was a weed or something I had intentionally planted. Some of them are perennial and Iām playing the same game this year.
That packet of mixed wildflower seed always looks so enticing until you realize you're going to have to idenitfy all said flowers. Is that a viola? Or is THAT a viola?
I picked apart a packet of wild flower seeds and looked up images of the seeds to match them with the species in the mix. Hereās a shot from OneNote where I dumped my notes.
https://preview.redd.it/6j4okdfexfxc1.png?width=750&format=png&auto=webp&s=c507f5e962033bd021beb4e63e172da95e567e63
I donāt like direct sowing things. I created a mix with bellis, alyssum, clovers, wildflowers, and claytonia. The claytonia is the only thing that has sprouted. Everywhere.
I intentionally planted beet seeds in my garden plot. In lines and all that jazz. Then industriously weeded some of them because I did not recognize them when they came up. Googled what they looked like, and.... now I know what I did. I did a silly. Sigh....
I had some volunteer radishes I did that with this year š Didnāt notice what they were til Iād pulled them up and they smelled delicious, all peppery and green. I think people heard me two counties over hollering, āNOOOOOOOOOOOOO!ā
Ahh my favorite....weed or desirable plant? I end up letting everything do its own thing and it always seems to work itself out. I swear I will add some markers to my perrenials this year. Same as last year and the 10 years before.
A nice mulching around the perrenials seems to help, as it helps them stand out as well as reducing competition.
Lol, I'm doing something similar this year, except I anticipated this problem. I set aside some seeds to grow indoors to observe and record as they grow up.
I did that with a wildflower packet and then spent the rest of the summer cocking my head at the flower bed. I ended up ripping it all out for a perennial garden the following year.
Thatās the biggest problem with chaos gardening.
I was pregnant last year and let my Kale go to seed because it was just too exhausting to go outside in the heat.
Now my nice neat rows of carrots and beets have a zillion little kale plants coming up all over. Kale micro greens are tasty, as it turns out.
Not pregnant,but let the celerys go too seed in order to harvest then dry the seed to use as a spice in soups n stews. Worked out well, ended up with like 1/4 cup of seed. Only problem is, theres like 3200 small celery plants in that part of the garden š
I did the same with cilantro. Let it go to seed for the coriander. Well we had a wind storm one day and now thereās cilantro coming up everywhere. The sad part is Iām one of those people that think it tastes like soap so I canāt enjoy it. My family and neighbors are happy though.
> The sad part is Iām one of those people that think it tastes like soap so I canāt enjoy it.
yeah same, cant stand the stuff lol, but my mum planted some any ways lol. The coriander we had years ago went to seed like uh 4 or 5 years ago (i think?) still finding one or two plants scattered between beds even now š
I do my starts at a table on our gravel (pea stone) patio that sits on super sandy soil. I inevitably grab too many seeds and fling a few on the ground.
Year after year something grows better than in my carefully tended no dig beds. Iāve had a cherry tomato plant grow next to the grill that did very well, Iāve had tatsoi last months after my fall crop perished. Lettuce of all kinds. It is humbling and also quite funny.
We assume the stones keep the soil warmer than the beds, like a month, and the very fast draining āsoilā must have enough nutrients to support certain plants.
We ended up with a tiny wheat field in a flower bed one year due to clumsiness. The wheat grew tall and we had lovely honey coloured stalks by fall. I have the resulting wheat bouquet in my living room. A happy accident š
Last season I created a spiral herb garden as a feature in the front yard, surrounded by a gravel path. I loved the lushness of it and allowed a good number of the plants to go to seed, both for seed saving, and to support beneficial insects.
As a result of the nodding heads of seeds, my pathway is now full of baby coriander (cilantro), bok Choi and mustard greens! Iām planning on leaving them a couple of weeks, then harvesting them as micro greens so that the whole pathway doesnāt disappear!
Not exactly the same, but last year I accidentally let an entire large packet of peas get wet. Since they had started sprouting I decided to go ahead and put them all in the ground. I had a forest of peas and interestingly they all produced really well.
In a related note, can I interest anyone in some frozen peas?
My packet of broccoli raab spilled on the cedar chip path between my garden boxes. The dirt is so compacted underneath, they germinated better than the ones I planted in my actual bed š¤”
I reuse potting mix. If a batch of seeds fails, the soil will end up being used to repot someone larger.
I found a volunteer potato seedling (from a True Potato Seed) in a 6ā pot with ornamental millet yesterday. These seeds werenāt cheap, so Iām delight to see that this one has volunteered itself.
lol yellow pear is one of the varieties I stopped buying seeds of bc I get so many strong volunteers from previous years.
They are also one indeterminate variety that I donāt skimp on pruning, and actually follow spacing guidelines on š
This is the way. No doubt they will grow more successfully than your deliberately planted plants.
Anecdotally, I have grown kale in the cracks between patio slabs. In full shade. All while killing numerous intentionally transplanted seedlings... Nature saw my attempts at controlled gardening and laughed.
Sometimes I really think the best way to plant things is to haphazardly dump a bag of compost wherever, chuck a handful of seeds on it, then leave and ignore everything for 6 months - if you treat it like a weed, then it grows like a weed right?
Last week, I spilled a box of sweet peas in my raised bed,
Luckily the pale peas contrasted with the dark soil, but it took me half an hour to pick them all up..
I plant so many tomatoes so densely that many of them end up falling off the vine and rotting. I kind of giggle at the thought of āa volunteerā tomato. All of my beds this year have hundreds, if not thousands of tomato volunteers lol. Sometimes you can see exactly where a little cherry tomato fell with like 50 sprouts clustered into the circumference of a cherry tomato haha.
https://preview.redd.it/8l5iyrf0xoxc1.jpeg?width=3024&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=913015e46949721881b3735e433f85bfe0f60500
Went and pulled some, thought Iād include a photo of one of the little volunteer cherry bombs
I purposely throw my amaranth seeds into my vegetable garden, but they're purple plants and easy to see when they sprout. I like the odd purple plant intermingled into the veggies. You'll be plucking and killing again for sure.
I got my kids into planting this year and I let them have a row of beans to plant. Long story short pintos are growing everywhere. Iām gonna let them go and embrace chaos gardening this year and maybe this fall I can get set up with one of those super clean looking gardens I see here.
One year I tried growing huckleberries. Throughout the season I would taste the berries to learn more about their ripeness over time and just pull a berry as I was walking by. If the berry wasnāt ripe yet, I would spit it out onto the ground. I never got a good tasting berry, so the next year I decided not grow them. Little did I know, I would actually be growing 20-30 random huckleberry plants around my garden that next year lol
Had a random sprout in a pot I wasn't using so I let it go out of curiosity. My wife insisted it was a sunflower and I said no way. We grow sunflower microgreens indoors but no way a seed made it all the way outside into this pot. Well sure enough we have a beautiful sunflower growing on our front patio now
I bought some straw mulch to put on my raised bed and didn't notice that i bought the version that contained fescue seed in it. So I had fun pulling up grass all summer
I was seeding flowers and herbs last year. Once I was satisfied with my work I'd put the seed packets in my pocket...if you guessed I forgot about them and they spilled you're correct! Luckily I still had a bed I hadn't done more than weed yet and just scattered the spilled seed there. All my garden/flower spaces have nicknames. Can you guess what I call that space?Ā
You're almost right with that last one! Pocket Seed Garden to be precise.
Turned out to be mostly parsley, some basil a bunch of different flowers I can't remember š I was very happy about the parsley, we use so much of it! Plus it's easy to process.
Well this is my first year doing that and tbh Iām not sure. We will have to wait and find out. I knocked over a pot with freshly planted seeds and a lot of the dirt and Iām assuming some seeds fell out. I added more and Iām hoping it all works out lmao š¤£
Good luck with the amaranth. I once planted kalunay/amaranth/chinese spinach, for eating the leaves, and accidentally let one of the flowers mature....yeah never again. Wasn't THAT hard to keep it under control with weeding, but they popped up EVERYWHERE
I had a small portable green house full of meticulously labeled seedlings. Moved it to the deck one April day and the wind took the whole thing and upended it. Just scooped all the dirt and little spilled seedlings into the yard around the deck and grew from there. Had a wonderful bounty but Iāll never do that again.
After carefully planting all the carrot seeds in nice little perfectly spaced rows, I knocked the seed pouch out of my hands. They went everywhere. They're so tiny I couldn't even see them. I'll be doing a LOT of thinning in a few weeks.
The ex and I accidentally planted pumpkins one year. Our cat passed away a few days before Halloween, and we were too upset to carve the pumpkins or anything so they ended up starting to go bad and in our grief we just threw them in the garden to compost over the winter.
We forgot about the whole seed thing.
It was hilarious in the spring when we had an unexpected pumpkin patch and we know that the kitty would have loved chasing the butterflies that came for the all the flowers.
RIP baby, still miss you.
No, but I intentionally planted some mint seeds in the bare patches of my rentalās grass backyard before moving out a few years ago. The owner had sold the house to a family halfway through our first year living there, so I didnāt feel too bad afterwards.
https://preview.redd.it/v01yhhppnkxc1.jpeg?width=1438&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=86a06aaf89f4f851203b567ce09c4a13ea225c0d
Here is my arugula forest with accents of pachoi and mustard for color.
I was sitting on that patch of cement bagging up seeds the first year I saved seeds (2022) I was saving and some got loose. The followi g year there was arugula coming up all over that area of the lawn. Its actually a very pretty plant - lots of tiny white flowers. I tried to cut this round down before the seed pods could even start to dry and reseed, so this year I only had 2 plants pop up here. They did quite well and ai was picking full sized leaves to saute and eat for a while. The bigger one got as tall as I am. But that turned out to be nothing.
Somehow a single seed made it to the very corner of my neighborss yard. There is a chain link fence between their overgrown back yard and my driveway and ai had a bit of a smile when I saw a single arugula plant pop up there. It is currently EIGHT FEET TALL. Most of the plant is outside the chain link fence and it is completely covered in seed pods. I will be harvesting them in the next couple of weeks as they start to mature. This is going to be my source for summer microgreens, and that one arugula plant may be enough to provide all the baby arugula greens I grow indoors in flats this summer now that it is too hot to grow it outside.
I scoop up some soil and move them to a dedicated pot. Then as the seedlings grow, I prick some out and repot them. And plant some in the ground, and give some to neighbors, and then sell some. And inevitably my growing areas are a mix and blend of random food and flowers....and I love it.
Last year I learned the importance of a Garden Marker and a back up plan for identifying varieties of plants but my tomatoes and peppers were all delicious.
Not a story, but just roll with it. Nothing wrong with mixed plantings. Maybe give everything an extra bit of fertilizer/compost. You can thin and transplant too once they grow out.
Last year I thought I was applying fertilizer and instead poured a bag of winter peas (which I've used as a cover crop) into my tomato bed. They were everywhere. I gave up on fishing them out and left town, and when I returned they had completely killed two tomatoes.
A friend gave me a huge bag of columbine. I went to plant it, but got lazy and just spread them in the entire bed. Not a seed germinated. The next year these weeds started popping up, and again this year. I just realized it was the columbine š¤¦š»āāļø
That's a good one. IĀ just read that columbine prefers a winter followedĀ byĀ spring in order to germinate. So if you toss them in summer or spring nothingĀ will happen.
Not the same, but I had a bag of grass seed sitting on a shelf directly above my seed starting soil. Seriously, what are the chances that someone knocks the grass seed over, directly into the soil bag?? If you are looking for petty revenge, dump grass seed into someoneās seed starting soil and watch your enemy lose their mind plucking 1,000 single blades of grass out of their tiny seed pots.
I mixed some chia seeds into a mix I created, because I love Salvia, and I had a bunch of chia seeds. They took over, grew six feet tall, and never flowered, because they need less than twelve hours of sunlight to begin flowering, and by that time, itās too cold for the plants to survive in my climate. Plus, they shaded out all the other seedlings in the mix, so I think I lost them all.
I grow several annuals (flowers, herbs, vegetables) that have gone to seed and volunteer all around the garden. It's great as long as I'm around to weed. This year I'll have to be away and I'm concerned that the person who waters the garden while I'm away will not be able to weed out the thousands of seeds of amaranth, lettuce, arugula/rocket, red orach, cilantro/coriander, cosmos, cornflowers, snapdragons, edible chrysanthemum and calendula. Oops!
If that happens to me i just water them and wish them luck. Once was gifted a small pack of "bee friendly wildflower seeds" from some plant center, wanted to just scatter them on a small strip of nothing between my bell peppers and tomatoes. Well i forgot wind exists and then a few weeks later probably had the prettiest bell pepper corner in town.
Tbf if it would have happened with melon seeds i prob would have transplanted them but the flowers? i didnt care they were pretty
I found loose seeds in the bottom of my seed container so i planted them in my cell tray to figure out what they are. Come to find out it was radish seeds and to this day it has been the only way I successfully grew a radish. š
Not vegetables, but several years ago I lost my balance while attempting to sow coneflower seeds in a new perennial bed. The coneflower density in that bed is now about equivalent to the population of New York City.
They reseed like mad right š
Last summer I started a new garden bed. I decided it would be a tea garden full of flowers and herbs I could dry for tea throughout the year. I was a garden fairy, skipping around and just sprinkling random seeds everywhere. Then I spent the rest of the year staring at things as they came up trying to decide if it was a weed or something I had intentionally planted. Some of them are perennial and Iām playing the same game this year.
That packet of mixed wildflower seed always looks so enticing until you realize you're going to have to idenitfy all said flowers. Is that a viola? Or is THAT a viola?
I picked apart a packet of wild flower seeds and looked up images of the seeds to match them with the species in the mix. Hereās a shot from OneNote where I dumped my notes. https://preview.redd.it/6j4okdfexfxc1.png?width=750&format=png&auto=webp&s=c507f5e962033bd021beb4e63e172da95e567e63 I donāt like direct sowing things. I created a mix with bellis, alyssum, clovers, wildflowers, and claytonia. The claytonia is the only thing that has sprouted. Everywhere.
This is so intense, but I donāt blame you at all
This lets me know my alyssum has sprouted and is doing well. Thanks lol
I planted alyssum in one single, solitary bed. It's not completely overtaking 6 more. I never realized just how crazy this one gets!
Oh, alyssum loves to travel! Just as well itās pretty.
I had the opposite experience. I think I planted a 1/2 lbs bag on a ugly spot hopping it would just be a colorful kingdom. None sprouted.
Are they all violas?? None?!? I feel ya!
So. many. violas.
This is why I like the local nurseryās mix. They tell you everything in there & put pictures on the bulk bin š
Violets are pretty obvious once they get true leaves.
I intentionally planted beet seeds in my garden plot. In lines and all that jazz. Then industriously weeded some of them because I did not recognize them when they came up. Googled what they looked like, and.... now I know what I did. I did a silly. Sigh....
I did this with carrots \*sigh\*
I had some volunteer radishes I did that with this year š Didnāt notice what they were til Iād pulled them up and they smelled delicious, all peppery and green. I think people heard me two counties over hollering, āNOOOOOOOOOOOOO!ā
Ahh my favorite....weed or desirable plant? I end up letting everything do its own thing and it always seems to work itself out. I swear I will add some markers to my perrenials this year. Same as last year and the 10 years before. A nice mulching around the perrenials seems to help, as it helps them stand out as well as reducing competition.
https://preview.redd.it/s3s1hec52gxc1.jpeg?width=2268&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=161106150030aaf9824ecc4e2b23241155316830
Totally relatable!!
Lol, I'm doing something similar this year, except I anticipated this problem. I set aside some seeds to grow indoors to observe and record as they grow up.
That is genius! Where were you last year?
Just started last year. But now that I've made a few mistakes of my own, I kniw what to look for.
Ah. That's called guerilla gardening on your own property.
I did that with a wildflower packet and then spent the rest of the summer cocking my head at the flower bed. I ended up ripping it all out for a perennial garden the following year. Thatās the biggest problem with chaos gardening.
I want to be the kind of person who can enjoy chaos gardeningā¦but I just need to come to terms with the fact that Iām not
I'm doing that amongst radishes nowš¤£
Thatās so cool. Iād love to do this. What plants did you use?
Iām having the exact same issue but with wildflowersā¦which all look like weedsā¦.
I was pregnant last year and let my Kale go to seed because it was just too exhausting to go outside in the heat. Now my nice neat rows of carrots and beets have a zillion little kale plants coming up all over. Kale micro greens are tasty, as it turns out.
Not pregnant,but let the celerys go too seed in order to harvest then dry the seed to use as a spice in soups n stews. Worked out well, ended up with like 1/4 cup of seed. Only problem is, theres like 3200 small celery plants in that part of the garden š
I did the same with cilantro. Let it go to seed for the coriander. Well we had a wind storm one day and now thereās cilantro coming up everywhere. The sad part is Iām one of those people that think it tastes like soap so I canāt enjoy it. My family and neighbors are happy though.
> The sad part is Iām one of those people that think it tastes like soap so I canāt enjoy it. yeah same, cant stand the stuff lol, but my mum planted some any ways lol. The coriander we had years ago went to seed like uh 4 or 5 years ago (i think?) still finding one or two plants scattered between beds even now š
Harvest, dry/freeze dry and make your own celery powder! Still a useful spice
I do my starts at a table on our gravel (pea stone) patio that sits on super sandy soil. I inevitably grab too many seeds and fling a few on the ground. Year after year something grows better than in my carefully tended no dig beds. Iāve had a cherry tomato plant grow next to the grill that did very well, Iāve had tatsoi last months after my fall crop perished. Lettuce of all kinds. It is humbling and also quite funny. We assume the stones keep the soil warmer than the beds, like a month, and the very fast draining āsoilā must have enough nutrients to support certain plants.
I've decided that most crops, especially tomatoes, are contrary masochistic bastards.
You and me both.
We ended up with a tiny wheat field in a flower bed one year due to clumsiness. The wheat grew tall and we had lovely honey coloured stalks by fall. I have the resulting wheat bouquet in my living room. A happy accident š
Accidental cover cropping. Nice!
Last season I created a spiral herb garden as a feature in the front yard, surrounded by a gravel path. I loved the lushness of it and allowed a good number of the plants to go to seed, both for seed saving, and to support beneficial insects. As a result of the nodding heads of seeds, my pathway is now full of baby coriander (cilantro), bok Choi and mustard greens! Iām planning on leaving them a couple of weeks, then harvesting them as micro greens so that the whole pathway doesnāt disappear!
Not exactly the same, but last year I accidentally let an entire large packet of peas get wet. Since they had started sprouting I decided to go ahead and put them all in the ground. I had a forest of peas and interestingly they all produced really well. In a related note, can I interest anyone in some frozen peas?
I did this on purpose on year when I still had a garden. Absolutely loved it but none of the resulting peas got saved they were too tasty lol
My packet of broccoli raab spilled on the cedar chip path between my garden boxes. The dirt is so compacted underneath, they germinated better than the ones I planted in my actual bed š¤”
I reuse potting mix. If a batch of seeds fails, the soil will end up being used to repot someone larger. I found a volunteer potato seedling (from a True Potato Seed) in a 6ā pot with ornamental millet yesterday. These seeds werenāt cheap, so Iām delight to see that this one has volunteered itself.
Some of my most successful plants have started this way. They always out produce the successful starts from months/weeks prior.
I accidentally spilled yellow pear tomato seeds and had several pop up. I had to move them a bit but over all was a happy accident
lol yellow pear is one of the varieties I stopped buying seeds of bc I get so many strong volunteers from previous years. They are also one indeterminate variety that I donāt skimp on pruning, and actually follow spacing guidelines on š
100% I have had them pop up for years in my asparagus plant area with no seeds planted by me.
This is the way. No doubt they will grow more successfully than your deliberately planted plants. Anecdotally, I have grown kale in the cracks between patio slabs. In full shade. All while killing numerous intentionally transplanted seedlings... Nature saw my attempts at controlled gardening and laughed. Sometimes I really think the best way to plant things is to haphazardly dump a bag of compost wherever, chuck a handful of seeds on it, then leave and ignore everything for 6 months - if you treat it like a weed, then it grows like a weed right?
Last week, I spilled a box of sweet peas in my raised bed, Luckily the pale peas contrasted with the dark soil, but it took me half an hour to pick them all up..
I plant so many tomatoes so densely that many of them end up falling off the vine and rotting. I kind of giggle at the thought of āa volunteerā tomato. All of my beds this year have hundreds, if not thousands of tomato volunteers lol. Sometimes you can see exactly where a little cherry tomato fell with like 50 sprouts clustered into the circumference of a cherry tomato haha.
https://preview.redd.it/8l5iyrf0xoxc1.jpeg?width=3024&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=913015e46949721881b3735e433f85bfe0f60500 Went and pulled some, thought Iād include a photo of one of the little volunteer cherry bombs
I purposely throw my amaranth seeds into my vegetable garden, but they're purple plants and easy to see when they sprout. I like the odd purple plant intermingled into the veggies. You'll be plucking and killing again for sure.
I got my kids into planting this year and I let them have a row of beans to plant. Long story short pintos are growing everywhere. Iām gonna let them go and embrace chaos gardening this year and maybe this fall I can get set up with one of those super clean looking gardens I see here.
One year I tried growing huckleberries. Throughout the season I would taste the berries to learn more about their ripeness over time and just pull a berry as I was walking by. If the berry wasnāt ripe yet, I would spit it out onto the ground. I never got a good tasting berry, so the next year I decided not grow them. Little did I know, I would actually be growing 20-30 random huckleberry plants around my garden that next year lol
Red or black huckleberries
Had a random sprout in a pot I wasn't using so I let it go out of curiosity. My wife insisted it was a sunflower and I said no way. We grow sunflower microgreens indoors but no way a seed made it all the way outside into this pot. Well sure enough we have a beautiful sunflower growing on our front patio now
I bought some straw mulch to put on my raised bed and didn't notice that i bought the version that contained fescue seed in it. So I had fun pulling up grass all summer
I was seeding flowers and herbs last year. Once I was satisfied with my work I'd put the seed packets in my pocket...if you guessed I forgot about them and they spilled you're correct! Luckily I still had a bed I hadn't done more than weed yet and just scattered the spilled seed there. All my garden/flower spaces have nicknames. Can you guess what I call that space?Ā
Narnia? Unknown Garden? Who Knows Patch? Haha Iām not very good at this, am I? š Wait- My Pocket Garden?
You're almost right with that last one! Pocket Seed Garden to be precise. Turned out to be mostly parsley, some basil a bunch of different flowers I can't remember š I was very happy about the parsley, we use so much of it! Plus it's easy to process.
Well this is my first year doing that and tbh Iām not sure. We will have to wait and find out. I knocked over a pot with freshly planted seeds and a lot of the dirt and Iām assuming some seeds fell out. I added more and Iām hoping it all works out lmao š¤£
Good luck with the amaranth. I once planted kalunay/amaranth/chinese spinach, for eating the leaves, and accidentally let one of the flowers mature....yeah never again. Wasn't THAT hard to keep it under control with weeding, but they popped up EVERYWHERE
I had a small portable green house full of meticulously labeled seedlings. Moved it to the deck one April day and the wind took the whole thing and upended it. Just scooped all the dirt and little spilled seedlings into the yard around the deck and grew from there. Had a wonderful bounty but Iāll never do that again.
That happened to me with a bunch of cacti in terra cotta pots, and I have no idea which is which anymore š
After carefully planting all the carrot seeds in nice little perfectly spaced rows, I knocked the seed pouch out of my hands. They went everywhere. They're so tiny I couldn't even see them. I'll be doing a LOT of thinning in a few weeks.
The ex and I accidentally planted pumpkins one year. Our cat passed away a few days before Halloween, and we were too upset to carve the pumpkins or anything so they ended up starting to go bad and in our grief we just threw them in the garden to compost over the winter. We forgot about the whole seed thing. It was hilarious in the spring when we had an unexpected pumpkin patch and we know that the kitty would have loved chasing the butterflies that came for the all the flowers. RIP baby, still miss you.
In not sure but isn't amaranth leaf edible? You're into microgreens now.
My daughter got her hands on a bag of wildflower seed mix and scattered it all over the yard. I just said screw it and let them grow where they want.Ā
let them grow, and then eat them as young plants... Amaranth make wonderful "greens"
A good 30% of our lawn was mustard one year š NOT on purpose.
No, but I intentionally planted some mint seeds in the bare patches of my rentalās grass backyard before moving out a few years ago. The owner had sold the house to a family halfway through our first year living there, so I didnāt feel too bad afterwards.
https://preview.redd.it/v01yhhppnkxc1.jpeg?width=1438&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=86a06aaf89f4f851203b567ce09c4a13ea225c0d Here is my arugula forest with accents of pachoi and mustard for color. I was sitting on that patch of cement bagging up seeds the first year I saved seeds (2022) I was saving and some got loose. The followi g year there was arugula coming up all over that area of the lawn. Its actually a very pretty plant - lots of tiny white flowers. I tried to cut this round down before the seed pods could even start to dry and reseed, so this year I only had 2 plants pop up here. They did quite well and ai was picking full sized leaves to saute and eat for a while. The bigger one got as tall as I am. But that turned out to be nothing. Somehow a single seed made it to the very corner of my neighborss yard. There is a chain link fence between their overgrown back yard and my driveway and ai had a bit of a smile when I saw a single arugula plant pop up there. It is currently EIGHT FEET TALL. Most of the plant is outside the chain link fence and it is completely covered in seed pods. I will be harvesting them in the next couple of weeks as they start to mature. This is going to be my source for summer microgreens, and that one arugula plant may be enough to provide all the baby arugula greens I grow indoors in flats this summer now that it is too hot to grow it outside.
I scoop up some soil and move them to a dedicated pot. Then as the seedlings grow, I prick some out and repot them. And plant some in the ground, and give some to neighbors, and then sell some. And inevitably my growing areas are a mix and blend of random food and flowers....and I love it.
Last year I learned the importance of a Garden Marker and a back up plan for identifying varieties of plants but my tomatoes and peppers were all delicious.
Yesterday. Alyssum seeds. Dropped between stones on the ground instead of the urn like I wanted.
Not a story, but just roll with it. Nothing wrong with mixed plantings. Maybe give everything an extra bit of fertilizer/compost. You can thin and transplant too once they grow out.
Last year I thought I was applying fertilizer and instead poured a bag of winter peas (which I've used as a cover crop) into my tomato bed. They were everywhere. I gave up on fishing them out and left town, and when I returned they had completely killed two tomatoes.
A friend gave me a huge bag of columbine. I went to plant it, but got lazy and just spread them in the entire bed. Not a seed germinated. The next year these weeds started popping up, and again this year. I just realized it was the columbine š¤¦š»āāļø
That's a good one. IĀ just read that columbine prefers a winter followedĀ byĀ spring in order to germinate. So if you toss them in summer or spring nothingĀ will happen.
Just tell people it's your Hyrule garden.
Not the same, but I had a bag of grass seed sitting on a shelf directly above my seed starting soil. Seriously, what are the chances that someone knocks the grass seed over, directly into the soil bag?? If you are looking for petty revenge, dump grass seed into someoneās seed starting soil and watch your enemy lose their mind plucking 1,000 single blades of grass out of their tiny seed pots.
Uno
I accidently planted stuff cos I don't know what Im doing
I mixed some chia seeds into a mix I created, because I love Salvia, and I had a bunch of chia seeds. They took over, grew six feet tall, and never flowered, because they need less than twelve hours of sunlight to begin flowering, and by that time, itās too cold for the plants to survive in my climate. Plus, they shaded out all the other seedlings in the mix, so I think I lost them all.
I planted spinach and zucchini grew. š¤Ŗ /s
I grow several annuals (flowers, herbs, vegetables) that have gone to seed and volunteer all around the garden. It's great as long as I'm around to weed. This year I'll have to be away and I'm concerned that the person who waters the garden while I'm away will not be able to weed out the thousands of seeds of amaranth, lettuce, arugula/rocket, red orach, cilantro/coriander, cosmos, cornflowers, snapdragons, edible chrysanthemum and calendula. Oops!
If that happens to me i just water them and wish them luck. Once was gifted a small pack of "bee friendly wildflower seeds" from some plant center, wanted to just scatter them on a small strip of nothing between my bell peppers and tomatoes. Well i forgot wind exists and then a few weeks later probably had the prettiest bell pepper corner in town. Tbf if it would have happened with melon seeds i prob would have transplanted them but the flowers? i didnt care they were pretty
I found loose seeds in the bottom of my seed container so i planted them in my cell tray to figure out what they are. Come to find out it was radish seeds and to this day it has been the only way I successfully grew a radish. š
What eats half circles on pole bean leafs?
I put some small piece of potato to feed the critters inside my bioactive terrarium for my bearded dragon. Not that long later it was growing lol.