“Free” Plants

It’s a wonderful thing to plant a seed and watch it sprout and grow. But even more exciting is when you find a flourishing plant that came up all on its own.

Every day we pick a few buckets worth of grass and weeds to give to the rabbits and pig. The rabbits will now all (more than 50 of them, including babies!) run to the edge of their outside enclosure when they see us pick up the buckets, before we’ve even started filling them.

Yesterday, we were weeding one of the garden beds. We didn’t plant anything there as that’s where we’re starting a compost pile. As we plucked up the thick carpet of weeds, we discovered a whole bunch of little cherry tomato plants (more than 10 of them). We had trimmed the huge tomato plants that grow in our inside wicking beds and dumped the cuttings into that bed. We obviously missed picking some of the tomatoes, and we’re glad we did.

There are also squash, bean and cucumber plants coming up in random spots around the place. One explanation for this is maybe mice had found some seeds and planted them for us. Who knows.

And yet another little gift from our animal friends is the pig “toilets”. Pigs tend to pick an area in their pasture and use it as a bathroom. Because we rotate our pastures, we have several of these toilets. And in every one, there are a bunch of little mesquite trees, squash and other plants growing.

Now, if we can just the animals doing our other chores for us, we’ll be set.