In the Garden with Pat Rubin

Bee garden writer Pat Rubin writes about everything that grows, from flowers and trees to vegetables and lawns. Pat volunteered for several years as a Placer County Master Gardener and has written about gardening for many national and regional publications. In addition to gardening, she spends time raising and showing miniature horses and miniature donkeys.

In the Garden will include news, events, advice and other gardening tidbits. Pat will also answer reader questions.

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May 9, 2007

Tomato seedling volunteers

If you missed a few tomatoes when cleaning up the garden last year, chances are you have clumps of seedling tomatoes sprouting. You can tell they’re tomatoes: they have the same hairy stems, the leaves may be tiny, but definitely tomato, and often the skin of the tomato that produced the seeds is still on the ground nearby. The nurturing gardener in all of us wants to rescue them and plant them.

If you leave them to grow, what will you get this year?

If you planted hybrid tomatoes last year, which are the result of crossing two different varieties together, the seedlings will not be the same as the parent plant. It’s impossible to predict what the tomatoes will be like. They might be good, or they may be tasteless and pathetic.

If you grew heirloom tomatoes, also called old fashioned, purebred or open pollinated, and you grew just one variety, then the seedlings will probably be the same as what you grew last year. You could separate them and plant them. If you had more than one variety of tomato in the garden, or the neighbor next door had tomatoes, however, the seeds could be the result of cross breeding, and again, there’s no way to predict what they will produce or how the will taste. You could be starting a new hybrid variety of your own, or the crop could be a taste failure.

My advice is to toss them into the compost and start with fresh, positively identified seeds or plants.

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