What have you accidentally sprouted?

I put lettuce seeds down and wouldn't you know it the tomatoes I tried to sprout twice this spring come up. Now I get to decide if it's to hot for lettuce or to cold for tomatoes. But in better news my potatos came back.

I've had almonds sprout in my compost pile. While they can grow here, I'm definitely not in what most people would think of as almond country.

After planting garlic chives twice in the same pots last spring and having not a single one come up, I figured the seed wasn't viable. I planted some other stuff, again in the same pots, then didn't get around to transplanting until fall...when blankets of garlic chives started coming up.

Oh! I just remembered one time I was digging down into one of my hugel beds one year and came across a centimeter wide root. I cut through it and kept digging, assuming it was from one of the many nearby shrubs. After a bit, I discovered the source of the probably 50cm long root - an avocado pit from some buried kitchen scraps.  This was first thing in the spring, so it had obviously survived the winter down there.

Dave said, "I put lettuce seeds down and wouldn't you know it the tomatoes I tried to sprout twice this spring come up

There was probably a problem with the soil depth or there was not good soil contact with those tomato seeds when you planted them.

It is most likely too cool for tomatoes to set fruit.

You might transplant them into something that you could bring inside on really cold days and make the plants last till spring.

Lettuce might do okay because I grow mine in spring/summer.

This might not be what you're looking for, but it's interesting nonetheless.  I cut open a winter squash, & there were a handful of seedlings within that were about 6" long.  I want to say there was a crack in the fruit that let light in, but don't remember for sure.  

On another occasion, one of my mentors gave me a 5 gallon bucket of persimmon seeds & skins leftover from his winemaking (I wanted the seeds).  Lots of them already had root tails half an inch long.  So, if you want to grow a large number of persimmon trees, here's the way.

I have on two occasions had volunteer cantaloupe grow from composted/discarded kitchen scraps.  

Earlier this year, I had a box of assorted old vegetable seeds that mice got into & ruined the lot.  I tried cleaning what seeds remained, but ultimately gave up and put them all on a pile of old potting soil, raked a half inch or so of soil on them, and said if anything comes up, it'll be a surprise.  The only thing that came out of that experiment was a handful of stunted cantaloupe plants.  At the time, I didn't know if the seeds were cucumber or what until they set a single web skinned round fruit that told me "cantaloupe".  I ended up saving some seeds from that one slightly immature fruit, and I'm hoping they'll germinate for a spring 2023 planting.  If it works, I'll continue to save seeds from any mature fruit.  So, what have I learned?  Cantaloupe are pretty hardy seeds.

Last year I composted overwinter and didn't get the pile hot enough to sterilize seeds.... but apparently it was plenty warm to insulate them from the cold.
In the spring, I used my compost everywhere.... and had dozens of volunteer butternut squash and tomato!

I've been eating SO MUCH squash soup. Giving them away to friends. Stir fries. Squash bread. Drowning in squash.
We canned tomatoes, fried green ones, made salsa and sauces, squash-tomato soup! Also gave away bags and bags to friends, and still ended the year with a PILE of tomatoes which were split or bug-eaten. Now they're rotting into the ground.  *sigh

protip: the tomatoes loved growing where I had used a thick pile of hay to mulch. The tomatoes growing in mostly-rotted-hay-on-dirt THRIVED.

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I've also had avocado pits and lime seeds sprout in the compost during summer. I have a couple avocado trees in small pots now!

I let some carrots go to seed last year because the pollinators LOVED the flowers, and then the birds LOVED the seed.  I saved some seed also for this year's carrots.  When it was finally time to clear the bed, I carried the old carrot stalks and seed heads across the yard, dropping seed all the way.   Now I have carrots everywhere!   I'm not sure yet if I like it . . .