RE: WHY I LOVE GARDENING - BURIED TREASURES AND UNSOLVED MYSTERIES
I love volunteers in my garden. I even promote it. Almost all vegetables grow best when mixed and not monocropped. Whenever I dig up my potatoes, I always leave the itty bitty ones on the dead plant and cover them with soil, then forget about them. In the spring, when I till the soil and get ready to plant, I've totally forgotten about them. But when they sprout, I recognize the potaot plant and am careful not to weed it out. These single, widely spaced potato plants always produce the biggest potatoes.
You can do this with practically any open pollinated plant. When my lettuce kale and chard go to seed, I pull up the mature plant and throw it out into the middle of my garden. Come spring, I have a million seedlings that I can dig up and plant in rows. They come up when they want to and are always the earliest edible plants in my garden. I'm lazy and a chronic procrastinator, so this method really works for me. This works for dill, carrots, lettuce, kale, chard, parsnips and almost any open-pollinated seeds. If you don't rototill the whole garden in the spring and carefully cultivate only where you want to plant, you'll have more volunteers than you know what to do with. You can even pot them up and sell them at the local farmer's market. Have fun.