Reseeding (ongoing volunteer) tomatoes

A couple of years ago, I planted Matt's Wild Cherry Tomatoes from seed.



For the past two summers, I have had an abundance (dozens!) of volunteer plants because they reseed themselves so readily. I've had tomatoes volunteer before, but they never do it for more than one summer and never in this number. We really like these little tomatoes in salads, and I've discovered that I can use them instead of paste tomatoes to make pizza sauce. I'm definitely hoping I will never have to start cherry tomatoes again!

My question is, has anyone else experienced this with tomatoes? Any kind, any variety?

Years ago, a neighbor gave us some cherry tomatoes seeds.

Those were the best cherry tomatoes I have ever had.

And the added benefit is that the next year we had volunteers.

I have tried cherry tomatoes since we moved from that location and I just have not found any that I really like.

If I run across "wild cherry" I might try them if we ever get out of this drought.

We got a variety called everglades tomato many years ago and still have them. We just started 1 plant to see how we liked the. and now they come back anywhere and everywhere every year.
They are very small but quite prolific, maybe a pint a week per plant all the way up till frost.

I've had that happen with a few tomatoes, but certain ones did stand out for their ability to sprout in our spring weather which has late frosts, hot days and cold nights, and extreme drying winds.

Matt's Wild cherry is one of those, it sprouts totally like a weed. It makes a little bitty tomato, but you can pick whole racemes of them at once, at least.  Everyone who tried it described it the same way - the most "tomatoey" tomato I've ever tasted.  Like it is the concentrated essence of tomato flavor.  It's really different than anything I've eaten before.

But my favorite self-seeder right now is a variety of Principe Borghese, a sauce/drying tomato the size of a large cherry tomato. Also good fresh and in salsa. I say a variety because it's a little different. It's indeterminate, and most PB sold are determinate. I also looked up PB on some Italian sites and learned that PB is a landrace variety of it's own.  Hence some variability.

I'm in the third year of growing this variety of PB; it seeds on it's own and I don't have to start any indoors if I don't want to. They sprout early and are very vigorous, and survive a mild frost in both spring and fall. I have named them Rodeo Frost for this reason.

They are very drought, heat and bug tolerant, but they did succumb somewhat this year to an unusually wet summer. Some sort of blight, but I don't know which. It killed one of the "PB Rodeo Frost" plants, but only mildly affected the other Rodeo Frost. So I better save some seed from the producing one!

I was also growing some tomatoes with known tolerance to: Early blight, late blight, alternaria blight, septoria leaf spot, alternaria Stem Canker, Fusarium Wilt 1 & 2, Gray Leaf Spot, Root Knot Nematode, Tomato Mosaic Virus, Tobacco Mosaic Virus, Verticillium Wilt 1 & 2.  

All of those tomatoes were very damaged, so maybe this issue was something different? I know little about tomato diseases, as I rarely encountered them in the PNW or the desert SW.

I'm growing one tomato that did survive the blight of this year unscathed - Wild Galapagos cherry, a different tomato species, S. cheesmaniae. It's delicious, a yellow cherry tomato, and I'm guessing it will be a self-seeder. But that's a guess...

Article about Wild Galapagos tomato from Terrior seed, being grown in salt water experiments

As for a big tomato that comes up very well on it's own, Thessaloniki. It's a Greek open pollinated slicing tomato that is heat tolerant, has a nice flavor with good sweet- tart balance, and sprouts somewhat vigorously, though not like Matt's Wild Cherry. I had my first tomatoes of the year from a Thessaloniki volunteer that came up in the greenhouse and produced tomatoes in May. It also sprouted in the outdoor garden, and is now producing again.

I'll be posting my seed share list later this year, and I'll put some of these tomatoes on there.  Or reach out to me direct if interested in a swap.

Kim Goodwin wrote:I'll be posting my seed share list later this year, and I'll put some of these tomatoes on there.  Or reach out to me direct if interested in a swap.

Kim, thank you so much for your information packed post. Very helpful! PMing you now about a potential swap.

Current tomatoes (Lycopersicon pimpinellifolium) have grown wild in my garden and yard for probably 20 years or more. Ever since I've lived here actually, they are the same ones I brought with me from town. They even do well in the weedy unkept areas around the edges of the yard. Several years ago, a random cross with some other tomato showed up and now I have five or six different kinds growing wild. All have clusters of small tomatoes and in differing colors and shapes and they all taste good.

My climate in southern Indiana is pretty friendly to tomatoes overall so volunteers are very common, I often have to weed them out of other crops.

I've never grown Matt's Wild Cherry. From the descriptions and pictures I've seen, I wonder if it might have wild current in its ancestry.

The first summer we lived here (2015), I planted an orange cherry tomato and a yellow cherry tomato and saved seeds from them. Orange and yellow cherry were the oh so descriptive names provided by the nursery I bought them from. The next year I started some from those seeds but every year after that, there were always volunteer cherry tomatoes growing all over the place, yellow and orange. My climate is not the best for tomatoes actually ripening so I consider this a great win!

Unfortunately our weird spring weather (early warm spell, freezing, cold all through June, then really hot) really messed with my volunteers. 😢 I didn't see any volunteer tomatoes popping up until late July and they never flowered.

Luckily I still have some old seeds saved in the fridge! I haven't collected any new seeds for a few years since I just took my volunteers for granted. So lesson learned! Collect a few seeds even when faced with easy abundance, just in case!

I had recurring yellow pear tomatoes for years, though eventually they cross-pollinated into yellow and finally red cherry tomatoes.
We'd probably still be growing them if we hadn't had to move. Yes, I saved the seeds, but haven't been able to duplicate whatever microclimate kept them going for so long.

It seems that I have been blessed/cursed with volunteer cherry tomatoes in several of my raised garden beds. Even with a particularly nasty winter last year and allowing my chickens to comb over the beds for small stray tomatoes, they persist.

I'm settled that this year I am going to try and learn the most delicious ways to prepare the cherry tomatoes. Maybe then the risk of the smallest tomatoes over ripening and dropping is reduced? Who knows.

I'm somewhat reluctant to allow volunteer tomatoes to grow, because my season is short and they need the indoor head start to produce a solid harvest window. Chipmunks seem to spread the seeds all over my yard, so I often have to remove them from vegetable beds where they'd smother smaller plants like peppers or carrots. Occasionally I let one or two of them grow though. The chipmunks spread a lot of other small fruit that I planted too (ground cherries, solanum alatum, retroflexum and villosum).

Here sometimes a tomato plant comes as a volunteer (once even in the public lawn in front of my garden). But they appear too late in the season. Even the tomatoes I pre-seed indoors early in the year struggle to get all of their fruits ripe.

I grow them from the seeds I collect (from some of the ripe fruits). The plant I originally bought was called 'wild tomato'. It has bunches of small fruits. The ripe fruits are yellow, but they aren't all ripe at the same time. They have a good taste, not at all sweet (so they are not cherry tomatoes).

I use the ripe fruits in salads. With the green ones I make 'green tomato chutney'.

They ae common in my garden

I have more volunteer tomatoes this year than I have ever had. It's wonderfully strange. I think of all the times I tried to direct sow tomatoes , with very limited success. This year there are tomatoes popping up all over. I don't know what kind they are, and I suspect it has a lot to do with the fact I planted my seeds outside this year, even the ones I started in the house were planted outside.  Two are under my planting table. The funny thing is this is the worst year for seed starting for me since the beginning. I transplanted a few, and left others where they grew. The strangest one is a tomato growing next to one of my tall raised beds. I was going to transplant it, then discovered it's rooted under the bed. I don't know if it gets enough sun where it's at, but I'm going to find out.
I don't normally save tomato seeds, but I would like to start, maybe this is the year.

Volunteer tomatoes are one of those things that either happens or it doesn't, and when it does you wonder why you ever bothered starting seeds indoors. I get a handful every year from cherry types that dropped over winter. They always come up later than my started ones but once the soil is warm they grow fast and seem tougher somehow, probably because they germinated on their own terms rather than being coddled under lights. The only downside is not knowing exactly what you'll get if you grew multiple varieties nearby the year before.

Photos of my 2 tomato plants

Joao Winckler wrote:Volunteer tomatoes are one of those things that either happens or it doesn't, and when it does you wonder why you ever bothered starting seeds indoors. I get a handful every year from cherry types that dropped over winter. They always come up later than my started ones but once the soil is warm they grow fast and seem tougher somehow, probably because they germinated on their own terms rather than being coddled under lights. The only downside is not knowing exactly what you'll get if you grew multiple varieties nearby the year before.

Also transplant shock. It's not just about adjusting to root damage, but also to new soil conditions with different levels of compaction/aeration, different nutrient levels, different pH... My peppers often need 1-2 weeks to adjust to transplanting, tomatoes maybe 3-7 days.