volunteers in the garden

Is it a volunteer or is it a weed?  When it's a plant in the wrong place, there is a fine line between the two. 
 A volunteer is a garden plant that has spread by seed or underground runner and has popped up in an unexpected place.  A weed is just that - unwanted and unloved.  With volunteers, I hesitate before I pull them out, because their effect can be unexpectedley lovely.

I never could have purposely planted this apple mint between the cracks of this retaining wall and had it flourish.  But that's exactly what it did on it's own.

This pumpkin is a volunteer that sprang from a seed from a volunteer pumpkin that appeared in my garden last year. Welcome back!

When putting together my containers, I ran out of purchased soil, and topped off this container with soil from the garden.  Out popped a tomato seed that had waited all winter in the cold ground. 



I planted one sumac a few years ago.  Now they are popping up all over the lawn.  I hope to have a mini forest soon.  They are easy to snip off if they become too many to be a good thing.





Volunteers are not always a good thing.  This is a sunberry seedling, full of flea beetle holes, but thriving.  Three years ago, I started sunberries indoors from seed, carefully planted them outside, and was rewarded with a bountiful harvest of black berries that tasted awful.  And I have been pulling out seedlings ever since.