I grew honey dew last year. I let the vines crawl the ground, no trellis. An issue with my climate is the melon rinds can sometimes rot on the ground before ripening.
I selected for tougher rinds by only saving seeds from those that made it ripe without rotting. (I think this trait is similar if not the same as shipworthy traits desired by big farmers selling to grocery stores.)
The concern is all those rotted melons and their offspring scattered in the garden. One one hand, volunteers can be a special gift that I didn’t have to work for. It’s like finding a $5 bill in an empty parking lot. On the other hand, this volunteer is basically the offspring of a reject.
It makes me wonder if some degree of weakening/inbreeding of a crop is a feature and not a bug, provided it allows humans to maintain control over the reproduction and selection of a crop species.
Persistent perennial crops have this issue when you want to do a breeding program and have to devote a lot of energy to eliminating the weediest forms after they are rejected from further selection.
In most things it feels like volunteers would be a great thing (wheat, ground cherries, etc) but it feels like it goes directly against your selection in this case. If anything i’d see if the volunteers have the same problems this year, and if they do then i’d make sure to pick them at least for a few years until you have a pretty good selection already.
This is something I find myself thinking about a lot right now, as I yet again pulled out and relocated and/or composted a ridiculous number of Matt’s Wild Cherry tomato seedlings yesterday. Where DO volunteers fit in the grand scheme of landrace gardening? Is there any value to keeping them around?
Storytime: I grew my first Matt’s Wild Cherry plants in suburban “pretty” raised-bed style the first year (2008 or 2009?) and clearly did a bad job of fall cleanup of the dropped/rotted fruit. The next couple years, I moved a few volunteers into my beds, focused slightly less on pretty and more on support with a round fence cage (it’s hard to have pretty when the plant has a tendency to produce 12’+ vines and you’re using a 4’ cage!) I watched as the plants survived an influx of hornworms over the summer and then unexpected early fall frosts with only leaf damage/damage to the fruits on the outside of the cage… the abundant fruits towards the center continued to ripen for another week until I finally pulled everything out and saved a lot more than I expected for the freezer. In the years after, Matt’s Wild basically went semi-feral. I always moved most or all of the volunteers I was keeping to locations outside of the main garden. A couple times I put them somewhere that might offer some support, but most of the time I didn’t even do that. They grew how and where they liked in their new home, and I just let them do their thing. Which is why I know with certainty that they’re mostly bomb-proof – they shake off blights, massive infestations of hornworms, heavily flooded clay soil, mild-to-severe summer drought, moderate or more shading, gigantic hail, yearly 50+ mph wind storms, early fall frosts, pretty much anything our area can throw at them, and they just keep producing. And producing. And PRODUCING. Without any outside inputs from me other than maybe a little sploosh of water when transplanted.
On the other side of this coin, something that bothers me about the variety is that they’re thin skinned. If you’re wanting them for something other than eating immediately as you work in the garden, it’s best to cut/pull the whole cluster in one piece because the stem-end skin has a tendency to tear when picked. And if they’re over-ripe, they generally fall off the vine if jostled. Thus why I end up with so many consistent volunteers every year – the traits I dislike allow for enthusiastic self-seeding.
Much like you with your ground-rotting melons, I’m left trying to decide if the value of “free” plants and the resulting produce is worth the risk of including rejected traits back into my gene pool if I let them persist in my garden. I would like to work on a diverse/landrace tomato… does that mean I am going to have to viciously select against my Matt’s Wild volunteers, composting any that come up within “unsafe” range of my landrace plants? Will I have to eliminate them entirely from the property, despite my love for their taste, hardiness, and productivity? Should I include them in my early crossing efforts, then put in all the work to select against the thin skins and easy-dropping fruits? In my case, the abundant beneficial traits I’m dealing with might make it worth the effort to include. Your rotting melons, on the other hand, might be another story, unless their plants have any other traits still worth preserving?
This depends on what you are growing. If you have something like tomatoes or have grown just one variety then volunteers are not likely to be crosses and are likely to be just like their parent. With melons I would be more curious what comes of them. If there has been several varieties grown together there is more like 50/50 change that they are crosses. Also there has been quite a lot of them to start with so culling to some of the best means those are something like 1/100 survivors which is likely to be good. I would not worry about fruit rotting that much on first few years. First you want to get crosses and only F2 on is where you start selecting more heavily. Although those might have crossed to your better fruit already. Still more changes to have as many varieties represented in your mix is a good thing.
One point of consideration- in the regions where crops were domesticated there was a prolonged period of gene flow from the wild ancestors living on the edges of growing areas. Perhaps self sowing/weedy versions of crops growing alongside more selected varieties side by side, especially if the weedy versions don’t demand any attention from the grower.
I think it depends on the goals. With some plants, I want them to volunteer, so I would select for that. But for many crops, volunteering could be correlated with seed shattering, fruits that rotted on the vine or were rejected, or fast bolting—that’s how the volunteer seeds ended up in the ground to start with! This is particularly true of any dry seed crop; saving from volunteers would mean that we would be selecting for shattering.
In my garden, sunflowers and squash volunteer because the squirrels make off with seeds and plant them. So I suppose saving seed from volunteers of those crops would be selecting for those plants that are easily attacked by squirrels.
I like what @ShaneS said above; keeping volunteers along the edge of the garden in wilder areas allows for potential harvests with little work, while allowing a low level of gene flow into selected crops. Volunteers are by definition vigorous, and their vigor can be an asset if not allowed to swamp the gene pool.
In my garden, purslane is a self-sowing weed. I did plant some cultivated varieties at one point, so those genetics are probably represented. I avoid digging it out and let the plants go to seed; other than that, there is no work involved, and it makes up a large percentage of the greens I harvest from the garden each year. That’s a great example of volunteering! Some of my ornamental/habitat plants are the same way.
I would rather not have purslane in my garden beds, so I’ve been pulling it out whenever I see it, and then eating it. But I would love to have purslane in my lawn, so I’m planning to collect seeds from wild plants whenever I see them, bring them home, and scatter them throughout my grass.
I’m also planning to rake out all the grass seed heads I can find, and then resow my lawn with a bunch of species that are edible, which I’m mildly interested in, which can handle being trampled, and which I don’t plan to grow as a main crop. Things like mint and oats and mustards and flax.
I don’t know if they’ll all live; this’ll be a test to see which are vigorous enough to survive and do well in my climate and with getting trampled on. Anything that does well will be welcome to self-seed. So I’m thinking I’ll treat my lawn as a wild area that I can harvest food from, and I’ll otherwise leave it to its own devices!
A few of the things I’m putting into that mix are seeds of crops that I’m also growing in my garden beds, like carrots and radishes. I figure if the feral ones can manage to go to seed despite being trampled on, they deserve to be in my landrace. If I change my mind later, I can always keep an eye out for them when they appear in the lawn and harvest them to eat before they flower.
On the other hand, volunteer squash are unlikely to please me, since they’re likely to come from my compost pile of rejects that rotted too quickly. I want to select for long storage life as a trait of primary importance, so I will probably just pull those out and compost those.
I say “probably.” This depends on my whim. I’m a very curious person, so if I see squashes sprouting out of my compost pile, I might decide I want to see what they give me and let them grow until I get a summer squash to taste instead.
Maybe let them grow, but remove all male flowers on them as they form, so they don’t cross into anything that you want to focus on? That way you can see if they do better than last year (i.e. less ‘rotty’ rind) but you don’t chance them shedding undesirable pollen into your trial?
Last year, I let two volunteer moschata squash plants grow from a compost pile. They were extremely vigorous and productive, and they tasted good too. Unfortunately, they didn’t keep well. The ones I hadn’t used after 3 months or so started to rot. In contrast, I have other moschata squash stored in the same conditions that I’m still going through now, eight months after last year’s harvest.
The only reason a squash seed makes it into my compost is if it’s from a rotten squash. So, it made sense that the volunteers from the compost pile didn’t keep well. Luckily they were away from the main squash patch so were unlikely to pollinate them. I did end up saving a few seeds from them early on before I realized their short shelf life, and unfortunately they were mixed in with the others so I couldn’t remove them. The landrace is still very much a work in progress so that’s just a bit more selection that will be needed in the future. I’m not planning on letting any volunteer squash grow from my compost piles this year though.
Yep, I was thinking the same and arrived to some conclusions.
For a landrace you want to add genetic diversity every year. One thing you can do is adding seeds from previous years. So volunteers fills that niche. And you do not have to do anything.
Volunteers are part of that reject yes, but if you got crosses, that volunteer is different from that parent plant, and maybe have some potential winning combination of genes in that next generation.
Maybe that reject got an amazing flavor but have bug damage…
Self seeding and direct seeding are great traits to have for me, so I do not mind crosses or plants with that.
If that plant was able to produce seed, maybe they got more adapted to my context.
Not all the volunteers are rejected genetics for me. I got a lot of fava beans, and they volunteer because I was late to harvest the pods.
Before I was more strict about saving seeds from perfect fruits, now I am saving for very diverse fruits, even then they are not perfect.
But yes, if that volunteer is an spicy pepper on your sweet patch… But always depend on context.
I am cautiously accepting volunteers in certain situations.
For ground cherries, I am wanting to select for cherries that don’t rot before I pick them. I figure I can gradually move them in that direction as long as I don’t accept volunteers. I have hundreds of ground cherries in a bed that rotted before I could pick them. I am purposely not planting ground cherries in that bed this year so I can cull any volunteers and keep things simple.
Last year, I had a pumpkin volunteer that came up in a bed and managed to produce 6 or 7 decent sized fruit before I was able to work the bed. That situation was a gift, an interesting experience. If it’s not in the way and seems strong, I will accept certain things.
I’m happy with volunteers, thats a strong seed to just be in contact with the ground and sprout when temperatures are correct. However, the other traits are just as important for selection criteria. Its probably case specific to keep the volunteers or not. I’ve had three really good years of volunteer celery grow…waiting to see if it emerges a fouth year…
I’m a chaotic style gardener. Why not give volunteers a chance on the edges?
Maybe it didn’t rot, but i forgot it, maybe it was taken by a predator because of it’s great taste, maybe it was too early to be on my radar and i should change my radar and be happy with early fruitflow, maybe it was too close to the ground, because the plant was extremely vigorous and didn’t have a support plant around to lean on or i walked past and broke a branch that still managed to set viable seed.
In general i like self seeding as a trait a lot, and i mean a lot. I’d love to be able to walk into the wild and harvest mini tomatoes or smallish lettuces hidden and parsnips and peas. How easy would gardening become? How romantic to go for a strawl and come back with a salad. And what i don’t harvest becomes someone else’s food spreading the volunteeriness and building the soil back up…
Agreed. There are many reasons why a plant might volunteer. If it’s something I deliberately selected against I generally don’t leave it on the ground.
In part of my garden I want everything to self-seed because I am selecting for things that need the local conditions–cold tolerance, heat tolerance, drought tolerance, heavy clay soil.
If I have a tomato spontaneously popping up in March, or a watermelon that makes it through the summer with no water, I want those genes, even if the parent was a reject.
If selecting for other things, such as being rot prone or not shattering in the field, I would probably change my processes somewhat.
I’ve taken to making sure weed seeds and seeds of reject fruits go into a big outdoor garbage can with a tight lid. I also put apples with coddling moth or apple maggot larvae in there. I call it my “death trap compost.” Eventually, when I finish building my outdoor firepit, I plan to convert all those things into biochar. Once I have it set up, I will probably start converting all those things to charcoal as soon as I accumulate enough to make it worth doing a batch.
In the meantime, I am keeping that “death trap bin” in my greenhouse, on the theory the scraps may compost a little and generate some heat. May as well make it be useful for something!
I want to have the freedom to be messy and accept all volunteers with pleasure, so I’m being very organized about segregating out anything I don’t want volunteering. (Laugh.)
Once I have it set up, I will probably start converting all those things to charcoal as soon as I accumulate enough to make it worth doing a batch.