While going through what’s left of the garden as I do my evening rounds, I’m constantly surprised by what’s still surviving. The still blooming summer squash and eggplant. The pumpkin vines growing new leaves and blooming. The bush beans still blooming and producing.
This evening, however, I had some more unexpected surprise finds.
The first was tomatoes!
Yes. Actual tomatoes are ripening. The tiny self seeded tomatoes in the trellis bed got hit hard by the frosts we got at the beginning of the month, but mostly survived. To find a spray of ripening tomatoes, however, was the last thing I expected to find! It also confirms that they are Spoon tomatoes.
The next two pictures are of pea plants I found near the end of the bed with the newly completed log frame around it. The last picture was of a group of three pea plants I had unknowingly stepped on! We didn’t grow peas in that bed. They were in the bed next to it, roughly 7 feet away.
My guess is a deer eating the pea plants might have dragged a section of vine away, dropping a pod in the process. Which still seems unlikely, but it’s the most logical explanation I can think of.
I’ve since stuck some short pieces of bamboo stakes into the ground beside them, so I won’t accidentally step on any again. I don’t expect them to get very big before the season ends, but I don’t want to walk all over them, either.
What a strange, strange gardening year this year!
The Re-Farmer
The Re-Farmer 
I love volunteers! The garden is such a mystery all the time. One summer in the old duck run which we haven’t used since getting rid of the ducks at least 6 years ago I’d say, we got an entire huge coop space filled with cherry tomatoes. They wouldn’t transplant either, I tried. But we had more cherry tomatoes, growing everywhere, all over the ground, over the chicken wire that was the rooftop, up into the trees beyond, for the entire summer. I’ve ever been able to grow them like that while diligently trying. And they never came back in that space since! 🤔 Beautifully frustrating! 😆
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Wow! That’s amazing! Especially with transplanting not working, and not coming back.
We had tomatoes show up in our compost pile one year. Squash, the year before. Nothing like what you got. Your duck run must have had some pretty amazing fertilizer that year! 😄
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I was so surprised your winter sowing worked. Are you doing that again this year?
I hear rabbits make better fertilizer than ducks, easier on the plants. My milk lady raises rabbits and they are so beautiful, and wow is there a lot of poop. I noticed the fertilizer first and had envy, then I saw the rabbits! 😆
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So am I! It’s an absolute game changer for me and yes, I plan to keep doing it from now on, as much as possible.
I’ve heard about how good rabbit poop is as fertilizer, though not about it being better than any other type of manure. Seems a very useful byproduct to have from meat rabbits, that’s for sure!
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