Thanks to birds, and neighbors who garden, not to mention the previous owners of our place, I get regular volunteers here, which I either nurture, move, chop and drop and/or feed to the bunnies and chickens, depending upon what it is and where it pops up.

My favorite volunteers so far have been the massive bird-planted elderberry that we left behind in Florida, and the native black raspberry that started out underneath our covered front porch a few years back, and continues to bear well every year.

I've now propagated it to the point where I have a dozen or more plants, which I'm getting ready to plant across the front of our place between our road and our orchard, the better to incorporate them into our deer fencing. Take that, Bambi. ;-)

I'm hoping that, given full sun and well mulched, they will grow and bear even better than the mother plant, and I can continue directing the new canes into the ground, to ultimately create a formidable living fence. Wish me well.

I had a gardening friend years ago who started a self-seeding bed every spring, which ways included miner's lettuce, peach, mache, radishes, carrots and lettuces, which he would start picking in early spring and still be harvesting by late fall.

There are at least a couple of other veggies I'm leaving out, but he made a high percentage of his salads just from that one bed, and they were always very diverse. Broccoli and/or broccoli raab maybe? Other brassicas? I wish I could recall.

He got a lot of food out of that one bed, and they came back every year. No must, no fuss, he simply put a couple of inches of compost on the bed each fall, and his only other "work" once the bed was set up was to harvest.