Letting Nature Take Over

Squash from one volunteer plant

This past year we had a lot of volunteer plants. The major difference between them and the ones we planted purposely is that the volunteers were a lot more prolific and produced much larger fruit. While I’ve had great luck with using the Moon Phases to plant them – better than just using frost dates alone – I’m thinking that planting seeds early and allowing them to come up when they’re ready might be a better way to go. It will require more planning (and probably more seed), but in the end it might be more productive. Since we do rotate our beds through the summer, this may work in our favor since we don’t have to worry about every spot in the garden producing all year round.

Carrot seeds I had planted at the beginning of the season never really came up, but they did start popping up at the end of summer all on their own – a full 5 months later.

Of course, not all seeds will benefit from this idea. Considering the issues we had last year with seedcorn maggots, seeds such as corn and beans can’t be planted too early and will most likely have to be started in flats.

I’ll make sure to keep you updated on how this works out for us.