Free plants!

Every year brings challenges in the vegetable garden, weather, pests and the like.  But aside from the beautiful produce you get to eat, you can also get heaps of free plants.

How? It's easy - if you're growing a number of a particular plant, let one go to seed i.e. let it flower and produce seed heads.  Left alone these will drop and eventually grow into new plants.

Over winter this year we have had a continuous supply of coriander, flat leaf parsley, calendula, fennel, alyssum, NZ spinach and more. Not only does this mean I don't have to start more seeds in spring, but these are readily available year round. I have some super tasty Italian wild rocket that I only planted once about five years ago - it just keeps reproducing from dropped seeds - and the bees love the flowers too.

Even homemade compost will produce plants - usually we'll have pumpkin, squash, tomatoes and even chillies popping up out of the compost.  I'm not one for ripping out free plants so if it's popped up in an inconvenient spot then I'll just move it somewhere else.

So don't be so quick to pull everything out at the end of the growing season - just let nature take its course and be rewarded with plants for free.