Go Volunteers! No. I&8217;m not rooting for Tennessee. Though I truly love football, I&8217;m an orange and bluer!

I&8217;m talking about all of the volunteer plants that have come up in my flower beds, vegetable garden and compost heap.

I want you to think about something. If a vegetable seed can germinate and produce a fruit or a flower seed can grow to maturity and bloom in a level 2 drought situation, they must be drought tolerant.

Every afternoon I walk through my planted areas of the yard and look for what might be a beneficial plant. While I&8217;m down on my knees inspecting, I&8217;ll pull all weeds within my reach because it makes the serious weeding project seem not so big. Besides, it saves energy from bending and kneeling. Why bend over twice when you can do everything all at once?

I have found several plants that have volunteered in my yard. Some of the plants are from seeds I&8217;ve never planted at this location.

So far, I&8217;ve found twelve varieties of plants that just came up on their own without any supplemental water. There are eight plants in three colors of Portulaca that have matured to about eighteen inches across and are truly gorgeous.

There are about 200 plants of Linarius zinnias in three different colors. One of them even volunteered in a crack in the driveway some ninety feet from the others.

I also found a Thumbelina zinnia, orange cosmos and Lamb&8217;s Ear.

In the herb and vegetable category there&8217;s, of course, tomatoes. Five plants came up in odd areas of the yard and are all cherry types. There&8217;s no telling how many plants came up in the compost pile. Since they&8217;re in the shade, they&8217;re not producing anything but little green tomatoes that never mature.

Also in the compost area, I&8217;m harvesting new potatoes from scraps and peelings that were discarded over the spring and summer.

The volunteer plants that I&8217;m most proud of are the sage, basil and cucumbers. I&8217;ll have basil until frost now and the sage will probably bloom in late winter.

I have been harvesting one to two cucumbers per day for about a month now from a single plant.

Learn how to distinguish between weed seedlings and flower or vegetable seedlings. You never know; you might have a surprise waiting for you