I don't intentionally grow self seeding tomatoes from year to year. But many years a plant (or several) will come up on its own. When I've let them grow, they have usually been cherry types. If you want tomatoes to come up year after year, try putting in a few varieties of cherry types, then leave some fruit behind late in the season and leave some mulch on top to soften the extremes of winter.

My volunteers often do not have ripe fruit until late in the season since they don't have the head start transplants do. For me, the volunteers are not a reliable source of my preferred larger tomatoes that ripen beginning in midsummer.

As mentioned in the above post, or implied, it makes a huge difference if you're talking about hybrid or OP ( open pollinated) varieties.

If fruits from hybrids drop to the gorund in the fall and become dried out then some of the seeds will make it through the winter and will germinate when conditions allow for that. But since they are F2 seeds the volunteers won't give you the same as the original F1 hybrid.

And for any OP variety if fruits drop, the same scenario, but unless those fruits had cross pollinated seeds in them the volunteers in the Spring will be identical to the original OP variety.

So almost ANY tomato plant in SE MI has the potential to give you volunteers, the difference being if a hybrid or OP, and the viability of seeds getting through the winter can also differ, so best not to plant variety X alone and wait to get variety X volunteers.

Years ago I used to dig up 10 volunteers from my tomato field and transfer them to s side garden just to see if I could ID what they were. And at the time I was growing up to several hundreds of varieties and plants each season, and had gotten away from growing hybrids.

Yes, I could ID most of them b'c I never sow seed of a variety unless I know what the traits are for that variety, but sometimes I couldn't ID all of them and that's b/c the seed that led to the volunteer just happened to have that X pollinated seed in it.

But I never saved seeds from any of those 10 volunteers b/c I only save seeds from varieties that were labelled.

But I did find it was lots of fun. LOL

Carolyn