We have volunteers at MWG!! No, we don’t have a sudden rush of people helping us. And we haven’t switched our loyalty from Ohio State to Tennessee or anything like that. What we are talking about is plant volunteers!
Volunteer Tomatoes
Volunteer plants are simply those that show up unexpectedly due to self-seeding or other causes. We counted over 30 volunteer plants in the garden so far. Most were a result of poor cleanup after the hurricane winds destroyed the garden last September.
Something we like to tell new gardeners is to not sweat it so much — just get out and plant your garden because plants WANT to grow. These photos are excellent examples of just that — plants that grew despite zero care. From the looks of them if we could let them all mature they would do as good as the seeds we planted purposefully this year.
Volunteer Gourd
Unfortunately all of the volunteers grew in the path area that is going to be covered in gravel very soon, so none of them will make it past this week.
In other news, we saw our first striped cucumber beetle on a zucchini plant this morning. Bad karma there.
All of the tomato plants that got knocked over in the severe storms last week sprang right back up and are growing like champs! Another example of the resiliancy of nature.
We harvested our first Super Sugar Snap Peas this morning. YUM! Confession time — for the past week or so we’ve been snacking on them to “test” and make sure they were growing well. 
We have a feeling the harvest totals we report for peas will be MUCH lower than the amount we actually grow.
Gravel is expensive. We have several quotes for gravel of different types to cover the garden paths and it looks like it will be about $60 if we haul it ourselves, over $100 to deliver! This is about twice what we had anticipated. We have been looking into other types of cover like mulch but gravel seems like the best choice for our situation.
