volunteer pepper plants
- Thread starter seedcorn
- Start date
hoodat
Garden Addicted
Volunteer pepper plants can be a real surprise package. If there were different varieties planted close together the prior year they interpollinate freely so you get some strange ones. The good thing about peppers is that they can all be used one way or another.
lesa
Garden Master
Normally, I love all volunteers! This year I am being careful to pull all my volunteer tomatoes- in the hopes of not spreading blight...Breaks my heart to do it! A gardener near here is giving away dozens of pumpkin plants, because she left pumpkins in the field and "surprise"! Enjoy your "free" peppers!
ducks4you
Garden Master
- Joined
- Sep 4, 2009
- Messages
- 11,730
- Reaction score
- 15,412
- Points
- 417
All tomato plants go to heaven, so don't cry!! 
journey11
Garden Master
I love volunteers! They always seem to grow better than the others because they got to do it on their own time under the right conditions. If I have enough space to work around them, I like to leave them and see what they become. Squash are usually something monstrous, but tomatoes and peppers come out edible. 
- Thread starter
- #6
seedcorn
Garden Master
I agree on volunteer squash, kill it as fast as it come up. My wife throws all stuff like that in garden, then it comes up........yuck. I think I have about 30 volunteer pepper plants w/more seeds to sprout.
obsessed
Deeply Rooted
I have a volunteer tomato this year. I thought it was a cherry but it is growing a nice big one. It is my only plant with a ton of flowers. gotta love nature.
Kim_NC
Attractive To Bees
I enjoy volunteers too! We only have 1 volunteer pepper this year.
We have 7 or 8 volunteer tomatoes though. We transplanted them into a separate area of the garden. None are big enough to tell what they are yet. It's quite possible some will be larger heirloom varietes....that, or we'll have lots of cherry or grape tomatoes. LOL
We have 3 volunteer watermelon plants in one of the compost piles and 2 volunteer squash in the pig yard. The pigs had various squash, zucchini, etc as treats, and voila! So I assume those 2 plants are a specific variety, not a cross. We'll see. We plan to move all of these viney volunteers into a garden area over the next couple days.
Last year we had a cross of zucchini/yellow squash that was quite good.
We have 7 or 8 volunteer tomatoes though. We transplanted them into a separate area of the garden. None are big enough to tell what they are yet. It's quite possible some will be larger heirloom varietes....that, or we'll have lots of cherry or grape tomatoes. LOL
We have 3 volunteer watermelon plants in one of the compost piles and 2 volunteer squash in the pig yard. The pigs had various squash, zucchini, etc as treats, and voila! So I assume those 2 plants are a specific variety, not a cross. We'll see. We plan to move all of these viney volunteers into a garden area over the next couple days.
Last year we had a cross of zucchini/yellow squash that was quite good.
lesa
Garden Master
Elf, since we had a terrible year for blight last summer- the experts say, to remove anything that comes up... Without blight issues, nothing wrong with volunteer tomatoes. I usually have quite a few cherries come up and use them with no problem. If you didn't have blight in your area- you are good!
