What To Do About Those Pesky Volunteers: Transplant and Keep Them!

When you are part of the way through the gardening season in early June and you see these pesky volunteers popping up between your now settled and flowering crops, it can leech the life out of your plants' root system, even if you are square-foot gardening! Heck, look at the overgrowth of my square foot garden on the lower right hand corner!

I found several tomato plants from last year and cucumbers popping up everywhere, making my square foot garden way too crowded. So I found every pot and container that I could and decided to transplant them. I differentiated the volunteers from weeds by looking at the stalk of the volunteer tomato plants, as they are hairy and when you rub them with your fingers, they actually smell like tomato:

The tricky part of this, of course, is to pull up the plant by the roots, breaking as little of them as possible. More importantly, not damaging the root system of your primary plants. I use a three finger digging system where I work my fingers into the soil about an inch away from the stalk (luckily my soil is very loose, thanks to worm castings, multiple animal manures and peat moss). I feel around for what direction the roots are coming from, sacrificing the root of the volunteer over the primary, when given the choice.

I filled the pot with rich soil from my manure/leaf compost heap and planted quickly, to keep the sensitive, partially damaged roots from the sun or from drying out. This soil, also like my garden soil was very easy to work. I even dumped in some additional rabbit manure directly into the transplant soil (unlike chicken manure, rabbit manure doesn't need to sit).

I threw them in old pots, container totes, plastic containers, etc. At the end of the day, I had 3 totes and two pots of volunteers which were transplanted:

I hope you like the story of my garden work today and picked up an idea or two! Comment, upvote and share!