Volunteers (we call them "carryovers" down here for some reason ;) from OP varieties are often the best producers as they are adapted to your garden already. I always dig up some of mine and plant them with good results.

The problem is 1) you will have no way of knowing what they are (but can narrow it down somewhat if you recall what variety was planted last year), and 2) if your last year plants were hybrids, these may revert (won't breed true). You'll still get fruit, just an unknown, perhaps strange, variety.

Tell us what your plants were last year and we can tell you if they'll likely will breed true or not. ;)

Dave

I always love volunteers, just to see how they will turn out. Last year I had several volunteers but unfortunately had to pull them because it was a question of do I leave these plants and throw out the ones I've grown? I didn't have another place to pot up the ones I'd grown. This year, I'm going to deliberately leave fruit in the garden, just to see what comes up next year. (I know I'll have more room for "leftovers" next year). MacThayer

I always get a kick out of this.

Here we save seeds, dry them out, pack them away where there is no moisture light etc. And here come these plants that the seed was left out in the snow, rain and everything else.

I guess the moral of the story is life goes on. Then again I'll bet there were 1000 seeds there if you ended up with just a few volunteers.

Big Boy is most definitely a hybrid. It's up to you if you want to see what they produce or not. ;) Many of us grow out hybrid volunteers just to see what they will produce. All depends on if you have the space in the garden and like to experiment.

Dave

Dave,
The variety was Big Boy last year. Since I'm an amateur garderner (albiet a lucky one) I'm not familiar whether this is a hybrid.

*****

For sure I'm not Dave, but I can tell you that Big Boy is a hybrid.

And I have saved F2 seeds and grown them out and it's the dropped F2 seeds that have given rise to your volunteers, so I know pretty much what you might get.

One of the parents of Big Boy is a large pink RL heirloom from the midwest called Teddy Jones and while I know the other parent as well, the person who bred Big Boy, Dr. Oved Schifriss when he was at Burpee, told me to never name the other parent, and I haven't. Seeds for Teddy Jones are not available anywhere b'c it's one parent of both Big Boy and Better Boy and John Peto when he left Burpee and started Peto Seeds in CA, now part of Seminis Seeds, took stock for TJ with him and used it as one parent of Better Boy, also a hybrid.

Probably more than you want to know, LOL, but the key thing is, depending on how many plants you let grow you'll be getting plants with red fruits of one size or another, and plants with pink fruits of one size or another, and all will have regular foliage. There will be more reds than pinks. The first time I planted out the F2 seeds I got 10 reds and 2 pinks.

Carolyn

I am thinking of digging up my volunteers and taking them to church for whoever wants a go at a mystery tomato. Mine were all OP last year and so were the neighbors on one side but I don't know about the other side. We are in a commmunity garden so 'neighbors' are actually rubbing elbows, er, branches. I will recognize Hillbily by his potatoe leaf pattern but who knows who he got up close and intimate with via the pollenators? They are likely to be all inbred. (waiting for hillbilly inbred joke here...)

The mystery tomato project sounds like fun! You might be able to start an annual tradition with that.

I named my F2 volunteer tomatoes "Annie's Lil' Basta'ds".
Sold all but 2 plants at my plant sale. They were in one gallon pots and already making fruit and blossoms.
The hybrid was Juliet. These plants produced the best little tomatoes, bigger than Juliet and shaped more like a Roma, Each plant had slightly different shaped fruit and sized fruit. They grew on short bushes like Romas instead of the long vines that Juliet makes. I thought it was pretty cool!

Right now I have Super Sweet 100s volunteers coming up in my Potager. Yippee!

I love tomato VOLUNTEERS!!
~ sweetannie4u

LOVE your sign idea Annie but I don't think it would fly at church. Some would get a chuckle out of it I know but not right at the building itself. After a Sunday service preaching on the Proverbs. (heehee)

How about this one :

"Immaculate Tomatoes".

:)

~ Annie

Catholic. Very catholic.(catholic tomatoes. I shall send them to my parents' to take to church.)

ok so now we have gone from inbred hillbilly bas**** tomateos to immaculate catholic ones. how's that for a 180degrees?

I'm getting volunteers from (I think) my vermicompost. I add my worms' castings to my beds early each spring, and since I get much of my worm's veggie food from grocery store discards, I have no idea what sort of tomatoes these plants will produce.

I did grow Celebrity toms in this particular bed last year, so I'm not certain these are grocery store volunteers, but I do think they are (don't remember allowing any dropped fruit to stay in the bed).

Does anyone know if it is worth the effort/water/fert/space to grow these volunteers out?

Yes, it's certainly worth it.

year before last we planted some cherry toms in the garden. all season long they never produced a single fruit! had plenty of blooms, just nothing ever fruited on them. come fall i gave up on them completely and basically let them just do what they wanted, no water, fert, insect control, nothing. then one day i walked out to teh garden to finish collecting water hoses(had over 800 ft of hose laid out with soakers buried) and all 8 plants were loaded with toms! we got a frost that night so we only had a few ripe ones to eat. fast forward to last summer. i moved the garden over a little and did nothing inthe area those toms rotted. guess what, we had a HUGE crop pop up and they were loaded with cherry toms!

i am awaiting to see how my "volunteer" sunflowers do this year. i planted about 30 last year and let them pop and drop seed as they wished. i may have a field of sunflowers before long! which is fine with me, they worked wonders last year keeping a lot of the bugs out of the main garden.

triple_b wrote:

"Catholic. Very catholic.(catholic tomatoes. I shall send them to my parents' to take to church.)

ok so now we have gone from inbred hillbilly bas**** tomateos to immaculate catholic ones. how's that for a 180degrees?"
------------------------------------------------------------
Uh...
Li'l Basta*d = Inbred hillbilly?
Immaculate = Catholic?

Interesting interpretation of my words and their meaning...
but maybe it would be better for you to stick with your idea of the "Mystery Tomato".

~ sweetannie4u

My friend (who kindly lets me help her in her garden) grows her entire tomato crop each year from the volunteers that have established there. The same area has been a kitchen garden for at least 20 years, and the tomatoes that come up everywhere (EVERYWHERE) are a large cherry/small standard, red, sweet, very very viney, and on each plant about half will be pleated and half won't be. Her strategy is to let them grow a few weeks then find the hardiest-looking ones and build bamboo trellis structures around them. Any others in the way of where she wants to plant, she rips up. Still, every time I go hunting in her pumpkin patch (or egg-hunting in her duck pen or down into the cow paddock) I wind up with a bonus pocketful of ripe tomatoes off a secret, hidden bush.

She laughs at me when I talk about buying tomato plants or even seeds. Tomatoes, she says, are weeds with tasty fruit.

My husband and I harvested neary 50 tomato plants last year - different varieties and the same thing happened to us this year, we are taking a chance at what develops. Good luck!

I’m in MN, last year I planted a big beef tomato and never cut the suckers, the plant grew so big!! Ha! This year I decided not to plant one, a few weeks ago I noticed the plant came back and it’s ginormous! (Obviously I don’t make it out to my back yard very often!!Lol) I see a few blooms but we will get frost in 3-4 weeks so I’m guessing it won’t yield any tomatoes. How did it make a comeback from a MN winter?