Urban Veggie Volunteers

[Pulsegleaner]

We'll begin with a tribute to something I often forget, just how much HEAT NYC can trap, and how for a given value, it is actually several zones higher than it should be. While walking along 45th I saw this in one of the plant pots in front of a hotel

For those who can't see it clearly (which might be a few of you) or have no idea what you are looking at (which is probably most of you) that green grassy looking volunteer growing next to the base of the shrub is...............a date palm (if you look carefully, you can see the date stone still attached to it) Someone spat their date stone into the pot (Antalia, the Turkish restaurant on 45th, is only a few doors down, maybe it was one of their clients) Nor is this even the first time I've seen this happen; there were volunteer dates in a planter on 43rd last year. And I recall seeing a palm in front of a café a few years ago that was doing so well in the NYC climate it was making fruits And I seem to recall a few years ago finding a seedling in a tree zone that seemed to come from a dropped genip (a green skinned little South American fruit often sold by the fruit carts)


Actually, because of the amount of stuff that is dropped on the ground, there are a LOT of volunteer fruits and veggies you'll find in the municipal planters. The area around 14th has bean plants in pretty much every tree planter some of which look ready to flower (some of them are also purple of leaf edge, which probably means that someone dropped something from the farmers market, since I can't think of that many beans sold as soup or salad components. The parks often have a smattering of wheat and millet plants (from birdseed the birds missed) In fact I was lucky enough to be there just after the clippers cut the wheat down last year, and was able to get a sample for my feral wheat collection. And the dropped salads mean that there are little tomato seedlings practically everywhere in the summer Some day I really should grab a few in case something odd comes from them (I can't forget the fact that, according to heirloom tomato lore, Broad Ripple Creek cherry was originally found growing in a crack in the sidewalk in Indianapolis, Scarab was originally found on a manure pile in a park, and 1884 (or some other one) showed up in a pile of flood debris. And of course, Turkey Craw (the bean) was found in a turkey's craw. ) And there are TONS of sunberry plants around, including a patch in Chinatown that actually grows out of the top of a stores sign)

There's a flowering squash plant in the Park at Chrystie street now as well, though that one may be intentional (some of the locals in Chinatown use the edges of the public parks as impromptu veggie gardens) least there is a cucurbit (this is Ctown so it could be squash, pumpkin, even winter melon. Bitter melon too I suppose (they're eaten unripe so it wouldn't happen often but enough semi ripe fruits make it to the stands* and then get caught and thrown out it is possible**)

Actually given that it seems that it is more or less considered normal to spit your fruit pits all over the ground, I consider it a wonder there aren't little lichi and longan treelets all over the place. (I've grown lichi pits, so I'd know a treelet if I saw it, and I imagine longan treelets look similar. Actually, they sell rambutans at the fruit stands there too, so that would be three) I suspect the only reason that I don't see mei plums and yang mei (yumberries) as well is that those tend to be sold cooked

So anyone else have any interesting stories of volunteer veggies you've seen growing in odd places (please don't overdo ones about leftovers from things you planted previous years be all you post, or they will swamp the thread)

* my giant bitter melon (the one whose fruits are about baseball bat sized) came to me that way

**surprisingly a lot of the vegetable sellers in Chinatown aren't familiar with the fact that the contents of overripe bitter melons (which turn a scary blood red and go slimy, like their relative, gac fruit) are edible (and actually quite sweet, some people in India use them in fruit salads) so you can sometime scare them by taking a bitter melon, opening it and popping the red stuff in your mouth ( just remember not to bite down on the seeds, which actually ARE poisonous.)

 

[digitS']

Pulsegleaner, you are one of a few seriously urban TEG gardeners, out and about in places with lots of foot traffic, even international foot traffic.

I've been reading a little about the "tree of heaven," wondering how it got here and why I didn't notice it until about 20 years ago. It seems to be everywhere in urban environments around here, growing up through cracks in the pavement!

I think I mistook the tree of heaven for walnut trees. I might have been rather complacent about a walnut invasion. Subconsciously, blaming it on the squirrels, I guess.

I have some nice fruit on a Coyote tomato volunteer. It's tiny but nearly fruiting the same time as the one I planted. Coyote is said to have been found growing in the wild in Mexico. Still, tomatoes were not native to Mexico so it was invasive there. Coyote is a delightful little cherry. Perhaps, I'm playing a role in its march north.

Indians were growing some kind of tobacco on Tobacco Plains Montana when whites arrived. That's in the Rockies, right near the Canadian border! I'm not a smoker and hope it hasn't and won't gain some kind of foothold in this location with so many smokers now growing tobacco.

Steve

 

[Nyboy]

One of my favorite trees, considered a weed by many the mulberry, is often found growing in strange places. i think the birds have a lot to do with where it sprouts.

 

[Pulsegleaner]

Technically I'm still a suburban grower since I live in the suburbs. I just have the kind of eye that actually NOTICES what is growing around me and care about it, so it actually matters enough to me to do things like rescue errant veggie and flower plants (a few weeks ago I actually ran out when I saw someone coming to mow the public circle in the middle of our cul de sac (to see if they could put an actual garden in) with a trowel just to rescue an errant Johnny jump up)

I am familiar with coyote. Grew it myself for a while.

One wonders if that Tobacco was actually Indian tobacco (i.e. the wild lobelia we have around here) Though the fact that a note was made of it seem to indicate not (Indian tobacco is too common a weed for it's presence anywhere to be of note).

And there are these odd patches of surprising crops here and there though accident or design. A lot of people are astonished to find out that there is a functional sugarcane industry in Louisiana ( if you've ever seen the Steen's brand of cane syrup, molasses or cane vinegar, that's made from the home grown stuff) or that Charleston SC has a functioning tea plantation, and the tea it grows is pretty good.

Actually a lot of people are surprised that there is any tea grown commercially outside of Asia. People are so used to all of their tea coming from China, India and Japan that the fact that it's also now grown in a lot of Africa (Kenya and South Africa both have many fine tea estates and that there is some really good stuff coming out of Belize. I've also been told by a cousin of mine that there are actually some tea plantations in Georgia and Siberia, growing very cold hardy tea (if that was true, I'd LOVE to get my hands on a plant from there; tea that can grow outdoors in Siberia would be tea I could grow outdoors HERE.)

You actually may have been half right. Most of those trees probably are Alianthus since it is the quintessential urban tree (it's actually usually assumed that the famous tree of "A Tree grows in Brooklyn" is a tree of heaven.) But since you are sort of West Coast (well, not really, but you're closer to the west coast than the east coast) some of them may be walnuts. The "Paradox" walnut, a cross between the English (J. regina, the one in your nut bowl) and Hind's walnut (J. hindsii, an odd little species/subspecies of walnut native to Northern California) was created (or a lot of people now say, discovered by accident) by Luther Burbank and is a pretty popular street tree on the West coast (or more accurately a version of it is, one guaranteed to be sterile and not cover cars with messy walnut pollen or roof denting fruits) If you ever care to check which one you are looking at, a quick sniff should do; trees of heaven may look like walnut trees, but I wager they don't smell like them (that clean, vaguely piney smell walnut foliage and fruits have)

Around here the all over tree is Paulownia, which looks a little like a catalpa except for that great time in the spring and summer when they are in flower (if you have never seen one, imagine a tree covered with giant purple foxgloves) Those and the silk trees (Albizia julibrissin) with their pink pompoms and their incredibly noisy pods (when the wind hits one in fruit, you begin to understand why another member of the family, A. lebbeck is commonly called (in less enlightened times) the "woman's tongue tree"

I should also make note of the occasional trifoliate orange tree. There's somewhere by Union square that has (or had) a hedge of these things (probably the "Flying Dragon" cultivar) and there is a MASSIVE one outside the gift shop at the Bronx Botanical garden) it is always a bit odd to be walking along in NYC in the very late fall and basically see a hedge full of what appear to be oranges.

Someday I hope to add a Japanese raisin tree (Hovenia dulcis) to my own yard too (since I like the idea of another sort of fruit)

 

[thistlebloom]

Steve, now I'm wondering about Tree of Heaven volunteers that I may have run across. I do pull a lot of walnut seedlings out, and those are a positive ID since the nut usually comes with them. They would definitely not be something that would volunteer in a crack in the pavement.
ToH (ailanthus...) seems to be quite the bad mannered invasive species.

 

[Pulsegleaner]

It's quite probable. Ailanthus seeds are quite small on the other hand

Oh and I forgot a really funny volunteer story from when I was in colledge. There was a One day I saw some frond-y things growing out of cracks in the sidewalk nearby my apartment. A quick sniff proved them to be fennel plants. Trying to figure out why, I suddenly noticed that I was right in front of a pizza parlor, and suddenly remembered that Italian sweet sausage uses fennel seeds and that the place sometimes let it's garbage slop over onto the path. (evidently they must have been old school enough to use real raw slicing sausage, as opposed to "rabbit droppings" Makes me sorry I didn't ever eat there.

 

[thistlebloom]

I find your stories of "found" plants in the heart of the city very interesting.

I don't want to wander from your urban veggie volunteer topic Pulse, but I had an amazing (to me) volunteer in my unused-for-a-few years garden debris pile from stuff I brought home from work.
I noticed something green poking up above the tangle one hot summer day, and when I investigated found it to be Sweet Cicely. It must have sprouted from some dead heading I had done a few years previously and grown unnoticed until it was tall enough to get above the branches and twigs and other woody stuff.
I pulled it out and found two large roots, that I transplanted into my flower beds. The fact that it had grown in that full sun, totally dry environment long enough to be noticed is what amazed me, since they like moist soil and semi shade. They are growing well and making sprouts for me now.

 

[Pulsegleaner]

Back when I was a kid I was over at my grandparents. We were taking a short walk around the neighborhood and passed an abandoned lot where a hose had been taken down, I thought I saw a flash of color among the debris and picked my way up. Sure enough amid the wreckage was a small but flowering petunia.

I've also come to realize that quite a few seeds I think of as being too tropical to overwinter here actually have no problems doing so. On occasions I have had both sensitive plant and holy basil plants pop up years, even decades after I had actually put any in the ground.

And of course, morning glories are in a class of their own, they basically live on forever (though as I have mentioned before, it seems to often be the case that, regardless of what color the flowers were when you planted them, after a few generations they often revert to the white (or occasionally pink or blue) their wild ancestors were, even if they are in an unmixed group (i.e. if every plant by them they could cross with is the same as they are)

Pansies seem to be sort of the same. Plant the seed of pansies you grew and simply let it cross randomly and if it stays fertile (a lot of pansies are so genetically jumbled they make few, if any, fertile seeds) and they go back to something johnny jump up/ heartsease like. This is what came this year from some seed I collected from my garden last year (most to all coming from large full size pansies)

you'll see that it has already gone back to JJU size and shape after one generation (though it still has sort of big pansy coloration; JJU's don't usually have the black bib and that white border is more or less unique to the bigger breeds) Unfortunately while this pany did make two flowers (as opposed to the rest of the germinated which made none) neither took, so no third generation (Guess I'll start again this winter with the seed I collected this year)

Actually as an expierment, I wonder what happens if you let domestic pansy seed intergrow and interbreed with actual wild pansy (as in that little white and yellow flowered weed you sometimes find in disturbed ground (and I find in the burlap around nursery trees)

 

[Nyboy]

I have the hardest time growing morning glories. The seeds sprout, vines have very weak growth little to no flowers.

 

[Jared77]

This is a fascinating topic.

As far as morning glories go they are here to stay on my neck of the woods. They take a bit to get established but the cover my neighbors fence in a shower of dark purple blooms every year. I just mow what creeps across the ground. I even have them climbing up through the deck on the front porch since someone wanted them.....(I'm just the guy who picks the best ones after she decides what species & variety. Oh & plants them of course!).

I've had them pop up in the veggies and other interesting places too.

Off to google trees from this thread....