Lack of Volunteers

It was nothing short of a massive horizontal Jack and the Beanstalk. Let a few volunteers reseed, go away for a week or so and come home to pumpkin and ornamental gourd vines covering the ground around the garage and the northern side of the house.

My 2022 experience with annual vegetable plants which reseeded gave new meaning to the term “volunteers.” The two intertwined and set about taking over.

At one point the vines and their lovely orange fruit covered the purple clematis vine and trellis, obliterated the three sizable boxwood along the sidewalk then headed over the lawn and up the house.

At first it was fun watching the rapid growth and the way the vines, especially the aggressive pumpkins, would head to find something to grow on.

The summer temperatures were warm and there was plenty of rain.

The fun times ended when I returned from an extended vacation and medium-sized orange pumpkins were hanging from the windows of a second floor bedroom.

This growing season I came out on the offensive, scanning the ground for any sign of a volunteer pumpkin or ornamental gourd plant.

But alas there has been nothing.

In talking to any number of gardeners across the region, many tell similar stories of few or no volunteers.

The mass of impatiens that came as volunteers in a Loysburg garden last growing season did not materialize this year.

Masses of reseeded tomato plants in the garden of my sister Janet’s garden are nowhere to be found this year.

“We have nothing, no tomatoes and the Larkspur, there is some but nothing like what I usually get,” Janet said,

The same can be said for many of the veg and flower plants that traditionally reseed in the garden of my sister Donna.

Interestingly while the traditional, easy to germinate plants did not produce in Donna’s garden, some of the more difficult ones are popping up everywhere.

“I was talking to someone and they have Sweet Williams coming up everywhere and I have Foxglove plants, they’re a biennial, coming up everywhere,” Donna said.

She also has tall wood ferns sending out dozens of new plants via the spores formed on the back side of the fonds, and the reseeding has spread to greenery usually difficult to germinate.

“I now have a second Red Bud tree, I only ever had one and now I have a second one at the bottom of my property, and I didn’t plant it,” she said.

Some of the problem with lack of volunteers may be the drier than normal early spring, Donna speculated.

Bob Pollock, a Penn State Extension educator who serves multiple counties, said it’s all a guessing game with cold winters verses warm winters and dry springs verses wet winters.

It always makes for lots of interesting speculation among gardeners and something he fields plenty of questions on.

“Some of it’s probably location and the weather conditions,” he said.

The seeds need sufficient earth under them so they can germinate and establish roots.

Many gardeners speculate it was a warm winter and many seeds need a period of cold to germinate.

But Pollock points out the icy precipitation and low temperatures at the end of 2022 was likely enough to give the seeds the cold spell needed to germinate.

The cold could also have served to prevent germination, he said.

“The week of Christmas was really harsh and a lot of seeds may have been damaged,” he said.

Regardless, reseeding is a subject Pollock likes to talk about because each year it hands the gardener something different.

“Some of it’s just luck and some of it’s Mother Nature,” Pollock said.