Do you ever grow vegetables and then just let them go?

Cafe Society
1

It’s kinda interesting actually. What do vegetables do if you don’t pick them when “ready.”

I planted some green onions a few years ago. Some refer to them as scallions I guess. I didn’t harvest them due to laziness. They’re still alive & growing in their little pot. But last year one of the bulbs pushed itself out of the ground so I took it and planted it in a much larger container. Now it’s formed a flower stalk almost 4’ tall. I’m hoping it will go to seed. But I never realized how big those little green onions could get.

I planted some radish last year. Harvested all but one, which I purposely let bolt both because I wanted seed, and I wanted to see what would happen. It grew and grew all winter. It doesn’t freeze where I live. Early in the spring, its central stem shot up, branched out, and each stem is covered in little white flowers. The main plant is easily 4’ tall, but if you included the length of the flowering branches, you’re probably looking at more like 7’. The flowers eventually form little pods and some of them just now are hardening & drying so I can get the seed. Who would have thought a teensy little radish would get so big?

Carrots will get huge. I learned that the common butterfly weed “Queen Anne’s Lace” is just the wild form of a carrot.

Anyone else find this interesting or am I the most easily fascinated person on the planet?

2

I did that by accident with a zucchini- hidden under its leaves. It was a enormous. Frightening, really.

Made about six loaves of zucchini bread with it!

I do all the time with chives, so I can get the pretty purple flowers.

Herbs, like parsely and basil, I just bored picking by the end of the summer!

3

Yes, I’ve done this with carrots, and there have been times when the squirrels got into the tomatoes, which resulted in volunteer tomatoes showing up in wacky locations–and I just let them grow.
In my old garden I used to have a patch of arugula which was always flowering, self-sowing, growing–in short, all versions of the growth cycle of plants were occuring at all times throughout the summer. I just let it do its thing.
I too tend to let chives grow wherever they might pop up. They are not too intrusive, and they are simultaneously pretty and useful.

4

Garlic is pretty the second year as well.

I have some tyme from last year that has a very nice purple spikey sort of flower going right now.

5

Spinach beet shoots up an enormous 6ft tall spire of green inflorescences. Leeks that I forgot to harvest grow to similar height, but the flower is classic Allium - a thin blue-green stalk with a huge pink pompom at the top.

Cucumbers, if you allow them to be pollinated (which you usually don’t, at least not with the greenhouse varieties, as it makes them bitter), grow huge, fat and knobbly and ripen bright yellow.