gardening Gardening is the process of growing plants for their vegetables, fruits, flowers, herbs, and appearances within a designated space. Gardens fulfill a wide assortment of purposes, notably the production of Aesthetics, aesthetically pleasing area ...

and

agronomic Agricultural economics is an applied field of economics concerned with the application of economic theory in optimizing the production and distribution of food and fiber products. Agricultural economics began as a branch of economics that specif ...

terminology, a volunteer is a plant that grows on its own, rather than being deliberately planted by a

farmer A farmer is a person engaged in agriculture, raising living organisms for food or raw materials. The term usually applies to people who do some combination of raising field crops, orchards, vineyards, poultry, or other livestock. A farmer ...

gardener A gardener is someone who practices gardening, either professionally or as a hobby. Description A gardener is any person involved in gardening, arguably the oldest occupation, from the hobbyist in a residential garden, the home-owner suppleme ...

. The action of such plants — to sprout or grow in this fashion — may also be described as volunteering.

Background

Volunteers often grow from

seed In botany, a seed is a plant structure containing an embryo and stored nutrients in a protective coat called a ''testa''. More generally, the term "seed" means anything that can be Sowing, sown, which may include seed and husk or tuber. Seeds ...

s that float in on the

wind Wind is the natural movement of atmosphere of Earth, air or other gases relative to a planetary surface, planet's surface. Winds occur on a range of scales, from thunderstorm flows lasting tens of minutes, to local breezes generated by heatin ...

, are dropped by

bird Birds are a group of warm-blooded vertebrates constituting the class (biology), class Aves (), characterised by feathers, toothless beaked jaws, the Oviparity, laying of Eggshell, hard-shelled eggs, a high Metabolism, metabolic rate, a fou ...

s, or are inadvertently mixed into

compost Compost is a mixture of ingredients used as plant fertilizer and to improve soil's physical, chemical, and biological properties. It is commonly prepared by Decomposition, decomposing plant and food waste, recycling organic materials, and man ...

. Some volunteers may be encouraged by gardeners once they appear, being watered, fertilized, or otherwise cared for, unlike

weeds A weed is an unwanted plant of any species. Weed or weeds may also refer to: Places * Weed, Arkansas, an unincorporated community in the United States * Weed, California, a city in the United States * Weed, Kentucky, an unincorporated communit ...

, which are unwanted volunteers. Volunteers that grow from the seeds of specific

cultivar A cultivar is a kind of Horticulture, cultivated plant that people have selected for desired phenotypic trait, traits and which retains those traits when Plant propagation, propagated. Methods used to propagate cultivars include division, root a ...

s are not reliably identical or similar to their parent and often differ significantly from it. Such

open pollinated "Open pollination" and "open pollinated" refer to a variety of concepts in the context of the sexual reproduction of plants. Generally speaking, the term refers to plants pollinated naturally by birds, insects, wind, or human hands. Controlled ...

plants, if they show desirable characteristics, may be selected to become new cultivars.

Agriculture

In agricultural rotations, self-set plants from the previous year's crop may become established as weeds in the current crop. For example, volunteer

winter wheat Winter wheat (usually ''Common wheat, Triticum aestivum'') are strains of wheat that are planted in the autumn to germinate and develop into young plants that remain in the vegetative phase during the winter and resume growth in early spring. C ...

will germinate to quite high levels in a following

oilseed rape Rapeseed (''Brassica napus'' subsp. ''napus''), also known as rape and oilseed rape and canola, is a bright-yellow flowering member of the family Brassicaceae (mustard or cabbage family), cultivated mainly for its oil-rich seed, which naturall ...

crop, usually requiring chemical control measures. In agricultural research, the high purity of a harvested crop is often desirable. To achieve this, typically a group of temporary workers will walk the crop rows looking for volunteer plants, or "rogue" plants in an exercise typically referred to as "

roguing In agriculture, roguing is the act of identifying and removing plants with undesirable characteristics from agricultural fields. Rogues are removed from the fields to preserve the quality of the crop A crop is a plant that can be grown and har ...

References

Botany Crops Horticulture Drug control law {{horticulture-stub

Background

Agriculture

See also

References