It’s one of my favorite gardening terms: volunteer – referring to self-seeded, unplanned, wonderfully spontaneous, just-helping-out, right-in-the-path kinds of vegetables and flowers. Some of these volunteer plants you come to expect (e.g. cosmos, poppies), but even these are somehow special rewards and make great gifts! And then there are the unexpected, albeit understandable.

If you flip back to this post from last year, you might gain some perspective as to why this tomato and many many others have grown all on their own. Actually too many little tomato plants volunteered for our garden space this year. It was nice of them, but I had to send some away (actually, I pull about 10-20 each time I got out to the garden, it’s sad but necessary).

These sunflowers sprouted not in an area where we had sunflowers, but instead came up under the bird feeder. How incredibly awesome! Totally didn’t expect that.