surprise!

We've had a lot of heavy rain this week.  While it's been nice to not have to water the garden and tomato grove twice daily, the storm brought with it cooler temperatures.  Today was quite cold for June (mid-50s) and tonight's low is predicted to be in the upper 40s.  So I've brought inside my five 2nd generation pimientos de padrón and the six habanero plants.  They'd probably handle the cooler temperatures fine, but the plants are relatively young, and I see no need to stress them unnecessarily if I can prevent it.

In preparing the ground for the summer garden, I've been mixing into the soil several shovels of compost per row.  As I've been tending to the young sprouts and transplants I've come to realize that the compost I added contained some apparently still viable seeds.  Surprise!  Sprouting up alongside the black beauty zucchini and growing in amongst the rows of italian white eggplant I have found nine tomato plants and three mystery squash.

Surprise tomato plants:

Surprise squash:

So I've put these surprise plants in their own cups and I'm planning on container-gardening them for now.  I'm really excited to see what they all turn into.  With the tomatoes, it's most likely that they are the larger "beefsteak" type.  The surprise squash I can only narrow down to butternut, acorn, or pumpkin.  They all look the same though, and distinguishable from the zucchini.

I haven't added any new kitchen scraps to that compost pile in several months, and so I'm really amazed that the seeds survived the compost breakdown process.  Maybe that says something about my compost pile...