As the garden is starting to come alive, that means also the weeds and every by-product is coming alive with a rapid pace. I know a lot of people mulch for this reason, but especially in the allotment...it doesn't always make sense.
But the thing with soil is, is that the better your soil is..the better chance you have for your plants to come out decently. Now my soil often sucks for sure. I hate buying potting soil from the store as this seems the biggest rip off ever, those bags are heavy and in no time it also feels drief out.
So I try to get my own soil decent with adding home made compost and worm castings and those kinds of things. Use some banana peel that has been soaked overnight and that water with it. Or some worm tea dialuted with water to bring back something. You know create a little bit of life in the ground there and add some nutrients back in stead of only taking them out.
As you can see on this first snap here there is a lot of crap on the soil as well falling out of the trees and no...I don't always clean it up. Those small little black balls and those small flying leaves that you can break open surely should not be in there. Sometimes I take them out, but more than often I forget.
Free life!
But what you also see in there is the starting of a small plant, which I have no idea of of what it will become. This just came out of the soil and I didn't plant anything here as yet. Hmmmm
Looking at the shape of the leave (and asking chatgpt as well what this could be) my guessing is that these are small tomato plants in the making. That surely would make sense as I had some tomato trees at exactly that spot which also dropped some fruits at the end of the season.
So I could imagine that some seeds have popped out, survived the winter and started growing over there. But I could also imagine this is the most infestive weed which eventually take over my allotment, since it had started growing out of here already at random.
For me this is the wait and see game. It could be that some super strong tomato plants are starting here. Honestly....if they are, they are actually doing a lot better than the ones that I had started inside...Those are still way smaller.
Even in inside plants?
The funny thing is that I am also seeing this happen on my inside plants in pots as well. Some similar shaped leaves are starting to grow by this small lemon tree which can mean two things.
The soil is full of life and just ready to give more and more action. Or the soil is just infested with all kinds of weeds and eventually they will 'steal; all the nutrients from my 'real' plants.
But uhhh...these seeds could have been in the worm castings as well right? Since I feed them a lot of left overs which also include tomatoes and I could imagine that the seeds don't always dissolve.
The funny thing is that I also saw some small mushrooms growing in this inside soil even. yes, this is also a signal that the soil is too wet. But come on..this stuff is alive!!
So what I am really hoping is that all of these little plants are just super happy little accidents and I will end up with an abundance of tomato plants coming from the seeds from last year. Wouldn't that be the true surprise of the year?