I often get volunteer plants growing up in my compost. Theoretically, if the pile gets hot enough, the seeds should no longer be viable, but you have to be a Jedi compost master to have this happen reliably.

Tomato seeds are very hard to kill. They often pass thru a hot compost pile or municipal waste disposal and survive.

robert, I'm glad to hear they're considered hard to kill. My compost gets HOT, but ... it definitely doesn't kill all my tomato seeds. (I'm not sufficiently systematic about turning the outside to the inside, to be sure everything gets hot, but even so, I was surprised at how well the tomato seeds survived.) In my tomato garden last year, I didn't do a good job of cleanup at the end of the season, and left the remains of fallen tomatoes around (I know, good garden hygiene is important for tomatoes, I should have addressed this!), and I had literally hundreds of volunteers in my tomato bed this year. I know, rotating crops would be good, but I have a tiny suburban (almost urban) lot, and that's the place where the tomatoes fit!

But tomato seedlings are so easy to id, and so easy to pull, that I'm not particularly grumpy about having to pull them from flower beds or vegetable beds. It's the violet and plantain and catalpa that are frustrating to pull! (None of which are spreading through my compost - catalpa seeds are airborne, and violet seems to spread by magic.)

lcpw

I plant twenty or so tomatoes each year, from seedlings I start. The volunteers are slower growing, and I use them to fill in when my transplanted seedlings get wilt/blight (three this year so far).

Its pretty common. Tomato seeds are one of the hardest to kill.

Its one of the clues that I use as a wastewater treatment plant engineer to notice if a treatment plant has flooding issues. I look for tomatoes growing along the fence line or in low lying areas near the plant. It means they've had overflow/flooding problems.

I remember when I was a kid, our town used municipal sludge to improve the soil in flower beds in the city park and around the county courthouse. By mid-summer the tomato plants were taking over! (Which, of course, led to discussions over whether you could eat tomatoes that grew from plants that sprouted from human waste, ignoring the fact that most of us fertilize our tomato plants with cow waste. Ahh, the selective ick factor.)

Catherine