Garden Volunteers

Rus decided that we should make our own compost. So he bought a big black plastic trash can and drilled holes all over it. Then he filled it with some dirt. Then he placed a lovely little bucket in the house right by the kitchen sink, for me. I fill up that bucket daily, he adds it to the compost bin daily (or else it stinks up our kitchen/house) and thus the world goes round. Every month or so he'll take a shovel, move stuff around in the trash can, and if he's lucky enough to find wonderful rich black dirt at the bottom of the bin, he'll distribute it among our garden.
Such was the story back in May when we started our garden. We planted everything from seed...an experiment to see what would really grow. We planted romaine lettuce, spinach, corn, carrots, basil, okra, roma tomatoes, green chiles, watermelon, cilantro, cucumbers, and...I think that's it. Then we fertilized it with our compost that had been...um...composting since last summer.
We watered everything.
The sun shone.
Stuff sprouted.
Everywhere.
And by that I mean everywhere. Stuff that we hadn't planted. We called them volunteers. The main volunteers were basil, watermelon, a wonderful canteloupe plant, a potato plant, and a couple of green chile plants. We also had a funky red flower sprout up faithfully along every inch of our drip hose on one of the garden beds. I don't know what it's called, but I like the color!
So here, take a tour around our garden (caption above each pic)...My Mother's day flowers which are thriving. Go Rus! The tall plants with the flowery tops are my romaine lettuce. They are out of control. And while we did enjoy them for about two whole months, they are now in fact kind of bitter tasting. The heat does that to them.The tree in the corner is our peach tree. It is also thriving. There are strawberries beneath it with beautiful little runners sending little baby plants all over the place. Behind that tree is the canteloupe plant and a huge volunteer tomato plant (in the shadow to the right). (Which incidentally has yet to produce any tomatoes. Very Suspicious.)See those pretty red plants? And the mass of tomato plants? And the watermelon spilling off to the left side?And here we did plant that tomato plant on the right, but it was supposed to be a container size cherry tomato plant, not a huge obtrusive yummy monster like it is.
The basil on the bottom left? Volunteer.
Watermelon in the top right? Volunteer.Hi rabbits! Please don't make babies...I'm not ready!This watermelon started before we built the playhouse and Rus was sure it would die. It didn't, and the one watermelon it has produced was delicious. The plant should be proud to be the baby of a seed that someone spit.Some of the bountys from our garden are seven quarts of pickles, 3 1/2 pints of diced tomatoes with basil (and one with green chile) and three eight-ounce freezer jars of pesto. Yum. We're on a roll and lovin' it!