You can separate them very gently and they will grow into tomato plants which will bear fruit. The problem is that you may have grown hybrids last year, and those would probably not come true.

Linda

Yeah they are called 'volunteers' and there are many discussions here about them the search will pull up as most all of us get some of them every year.

Years of experience with them has proven to me that 80% of the time they aren't worth the space and should be pulled and fresh, known variety plants planted in the space instead. If they were either hybrids or cross-pollinated plants then as Linda said, they won't breed true or in some cases, even develop fruit.

But others prefer to give at least a few of them a try if they have the room just to see what happens/develops and what it tastes like. But they shouldn't be considered you only source of tomatoes, just a side line experiment.

I certainly can't recommend selling them or even giving them away since you can't have any idea if they will even produce fruit, much less fruit that is edible.

So if you know the name of the varieties you planted last year and can find out if they were hybrid varieties or open-pollinated varieties, you'll have the answer to keeping them or not.

Dave

So if you know the name of the varieties you planted last year and can find out if they were hybrid varieties or open-pollinated varieties, you'll have the answer to keeping them or not.

********

And even if you do know the names of the ones you planted last year, and some were hybrids, you can't tell the difference between a volunteer that was OP (open pollinated), or a plant that resulted from the F2 seeds of a hybrid that overwintered.

In the Spring just for the heck of it I used to take about 10 volunteers from my main tomato field and move them to a side garden, just to see if I could ID them.

Sometimes I could, and sometimes I could not, and the other variable here is that some of the OP's could cross pollinate thus the volunteers from those cross pollinated seeds could not be Ided.

Anything you want to do with them is your choice, but as Dave said, I certainly wouldnt give then to others, and if you are curious about them, do what I did, just for fun. (smile)

Carolyn