If you want to keep some of the volunteers, carefully move them as soon as possible. The longer they sit there, the bigger the roots get and the more likely they'll be intertwined with your transplants. If you don't really care about the volunteers and worry more about hurting your transplants, I'd do away with them where they sit.

Volunteers usually screw me up and waste garden space. I let a volunteer winter squash grow in my high tunnel. It took up tons of space and ended up producing nothing because mice got all the squashes. I couldn't bear to let dill seedlings go to waste but it turns out 5x5' square are of dill is far more than the average person needs so, again, wasted space. I thought calendula and borage would be nice scattered in one veggie bed but they both get a lot bigger with big root systems. My herb garden is infested with garlic chives. I agree, move the seedlings you really want. I am still chiding myself for transplanting some gift red cabbage seedlings into several 6-packs because last year, 6 red cabbage plants were more than I needed. I have a couple of brassica seedlings in my high tunnel now and will probably put them in my next salad. But yesterday I also started pulling up bushel basket size claytonia and putting it in the compost bin. I vote for making a salad.

If most of your volunteers are brassicas and other things with edible leaves, then I would do what defrost49 described, and put them in salads or preserve them as greens. By the time your transplants are big enough to need the space, you will have eaten up your volunteers.

Wow defrost49 I feel for you! Some of the examples you mentioned is exactly what I am going through!!

I think from all your great advice, I will move what I can and if I am afraid it would hurt my transplanted then I would just harvest and eat the young leaves. As for seedlings like calendula, I will probably just dump them as I did not know it has a big root system. Some volunteers are ones I never really wanted in the first place but thought it would be a waste to throw out, but I guess I just have to think about how it will grow throughout the season.

Throw some calendula seedlings in pots. It's an easy and pretty plant to grow.

Rodney

For me, it would depend on how established the volunteers are and how newly set in or established my transplants are.
It can be surprisingly easy to get volunteers out without hurting transplants- after all, we yank out weeds from around our transplants.
I've found that using a soup spoon instead of a larger trowel works
best for digging out volunteers. Especially when they spring up during
the wrong time of establishment for transplants. A spoon is a more
precise tool that is less likely to disturb the transplants.

If so.. if you want them, replant them. If you are feeling really nice, pot them up and set them out for free for other community gardeners to enjoy. If you don't feel like that, pitch them into the compost pile.
And very fresh transplants IMO aren't hurt all that much with a lil shuffle from doing such a thing. I've gone out a couple days after setting in a garden, and deciding something needs to be moved a bit, and done so with no harm done. After a couple weeks though, I consider transplants established in enough that it could be rather harmful to mess with them at that stage of establishment.

my volunteers are chicory, celery, red mustard in great quantity, some garlic, some pole beans and some arugula. they get eaten, and it is a pleasure to get something for no work. I let fruiting plants go only if the garden is less than full, and anyway tomatoes don't make it in time here, only summer squash.

Thanks everybody! All your comments are really easy and logical and super useful, especially for a novice like me!!! I love this forum!

Been gardening for over fifty years. Have finally figured out that a "weed" is a plant where you don't want it. e.g. Routinely find a nice healthy potato plant, etc. between two rows of sweet corn. Naturally I leave it alone, however, now I can't run the tiller between those rows, so have to hoe. :-( Decided that it's enough of a challenge to get things from seeds to harvest dealing with weather, insects, disease, etc. without trying to work around interlopers that I didn't plant and probably don't want. JMHO

I grew 'Superior' potatoes a few years ago. I missed a nice potato when I dug up the crop and found it the following spring when digging up the garden. Since it had sprouted, I moved it to a good site and marked the spot with a stick. It grew well and bore 5 nice potatoes and a few marble sized ones. After harvesting my "free potatoes", I planted the marble sized spuds back in the same place in the hope they would grow the following year again.

Success! They are up so I have another year of "free" potatoes. The crop that keeps coming back.

I grew dill last year. This year I have little volunteer dill plants everywhere.

One bad lesson I learned is to NEVER plant morning glories in the garden. After planting them, I have had volunteer plants come up the past 6 years! I try to pull them all out but a few get away from me late in the season and run up the tomato plants and flower. Seeds fall everywhere so the problem comes back every year.

I have had "volunteer' tomatoes come up where the previous year's cherry tomatoes grew. Sometime so many come up on their own, I have to wonder why I keep starting more from seed under my lights each winter?

Spartan....Morning glories AND Nasty nasturtiums! A few have snuck into my garden and I have to do a search to get rid of them!

I even have a bunch of compost that I won't use in the garden cause MGs grew up the fence there! It's going into the "vining" garden! Nancy

Thanks for sharing everybody and do continue! Yeah, I have bindweed everywhere as well as buttercups. Those are obvious weeds for me that I obsessively weed. As for my original question, I think I am going to leave most of my volunteer Swiss chard at their place unless they are growing right beside my tomatoes, peppers and corn.

Of course if they are not crowding your plants at the moment, you can let them get big and then harvest them when your plants seem to need the space.

In my small kitchen-door garden that gets a lot of attention, the volunteers are dill, calendula and bachelors buttons. I always just leave a few where they might have a good spot for themselves. In the bigger garden, volunteers also include arugula, marigolds, and a red amaranth that we originally planted as an ornamental but it's tasty. A lot of weeds make a pleasant cooking green, once they're big enough to bother with, so I don't even plant spinach for the summer, I just collect the: red amaranth, pigweed amaranth, lambsquarters, malva, etc.

So I was out at my big cantaloupe patch, and noticed some BIG FLOWERS. Errr, cantaloupe has small flowers. Uh, wait, there are some leaves that look bigger too. Yep, I have a very healthy volunteer squash plant growing right in the middle of my cantaloupes. Came from my compost, which I troweled into the bed early on. Could be a butternut, but is more likely a tromboncino. Now, I have loads of canteloupes, so it's not going to affect anything, but it would be pretty cool if I get a tromboncino squash out of my cantaloupe patch. Volunteer edibles are fun, especially if you don't see them until they're mature.

when they don't climb, it is easy to get a five foot tromboncino hidden in the jungle. but you know what? I have eaten four footers (with help of course) and they are still decent.