Volunteer Tomatoes

Every year gardeners turn their soil, add soil amendments, and then either plant their seeds or seedlings - but regardless of the year, the inevitable always occurs... Tomato seedlings appear as if from nowhere in the oddest of places. Well, not quite so odd usually. A few volunteer tomatoes in your garden beds are to be expected, but still others will appear in strange places.

One such plant arrived under our faucet at an opportune time to be transplanted into our new, renovated, rebuilt from the ground up, garden. I was content to leave the small tomato bush growing under the faucet alone, but as the carpenters put the finishing touches on the garden (now also known as our greenhouse) and we prepared the beds to receive the tomato plants I'd so abused with multiple transplants, this volunteer underneath our faucet experienced a crisis... 

Okay, maybe not so much a crisis as a complete shock to its system. I didn't think it would survive whatever it was that almost killed it... Anyhow, I took pity on the nearly leafless, wilting stem, and stuck it into one of the beds in the garden. Please do note that it was growing out from under a slab of concrete, under a faucet, and when I pulled it up to put into the garden, I didn't expect it to survive, even if I did manage to save its roots, so I was just a little careless and nonchalant about the transplant. Okay, I confess... I was a murderous brute of a plant killer, and by rights, that tomato plant should've died. It probably would've died if I'd left it where it was at... All that moisture from the tap was probably killing it.

As it turns out, after a week or so a bunch of shoots formed along the parts of the stem that I allowed to remain above ground, and 'lo and behold, today there is a very productive, almost dwarfish tomato plant laden with medium sized fruit averaging 2 to 3 inches in diameter, with one that came in at about 3.5 inches. No, I didn't get a picture... When it ripened, I picked it and left it in the kitchen, whereupon somebody ate it and declared it absolutely delicious. So, all I have is a declaration of deliciousness. Since then a few more fruits have ripened off of the same plant, and I am determined to eat one of them before someone else beats me to it. I also feel that I should mention that the fruit from this volunteer tomato is round... almost perfectly so. They also seem to ripen almost uniformly to a deep orange/red color that literally begs to be eaten, which is probably why the previous ripe tomato from this very same bush met such an early and swift demise once it had been set out in the kitchen on the "tomato" tray.

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That, however, isn't the only volunteer tomato in the garden. At some point, while we were waiting for our "planned" varieties to mature, another volunteer popped up in one of the new garden beds that we'd prepped and seeded with cabbage, green onions, and carrots. I remained undecided as to what to do with this volunteer, so I let it continue to grow until it was about two feet high. At about that time, we'd decided the cabbage seeds we'd put into that bed were bogus, and so I decided to rescue the tomato plant and put it into a bed where it was unlikely to be disturbed at a later date to make room for lettuce or something.

Now, this volunteer has quite a lot of fruit. Like the other volunteer, it also seems to be on the short and stubby side, topping out right now at only 3.5 feet high. The fruit, however, are very interesting, in that they are oblate and seem to expand to about 1-2 inches in diameter before stalling. I'm assuming this means that they're preparing to mature and ripen at that size, but they're a very pretty white-green color, whereas the other volunteer tomato has unripe fruit that are a darker green in color. Now, I'm quite familiar with the variety that was grown previously in the garden when it was under the control of our landscaper (during which time I itched for control, but it wasn't until we did the remodel that i was granted my own lead to do with the garden as I wished); but to return to the topic of the volunteers, I cannot say that I recognize either of them as belonging to the same variety as the previous planting.

Now, this could be caused by the possibility that the previous variety had been a hybrid, and that what I'm observing are two F2 generation plants exhibiting two very different phenotypes belonging to the parents of the original F1 hybrid. I like this explanation because it gives me a reason that makes sense. The second possibility is that both plants are from two different parental stock, and were deposited unceremoniously by various pests. We, being the only tomato growers in our neighborhood, and our neighborhood consisting of a lot of jungle, a few banana and taro plantations, and very few people, I think the second possibility is unlikely.

I'm inclined to think that maybe if we can stabilize both strains, if they're hybrid F2 generation, then we may have a good thing going here. Disease resistant, as they obviously are, and dwarfish in size (although I think they're just waiting for a good opportunity to bolt), and prolific, I can think of no better way to pass the time than to try and see if we can stabilize either or both strains. It is certainly something to ask the local Land Grant (the local name for the Agricultural Extension).