A True Volunteer

 

They're sweet and juicy

The Oxford defines a volunteer as "a person who does something without being forced".

It's a term usually applied to a person, but my father-in-law, a lifetime farmer, used it to refer to plants which came up all by themselves without being planted by human hands. He grew mostly peanuts.

Until I met him, I had never heard the term used in this way. His often unconventional and picturesque use of language reflected a life lived richly across many parts of the country, and a keen sense of observation.

More recently, I have been involved in exploring the use of the term as it applied to the use of conscripts in this country between 1965 and 1972. I was amazed to find that there are those who define conscripts as volunteers.

Upon analysis, it became clear that mythology has no respect for facts and history, so the volunteer myth persists like barnacles on a boat.

With that concession to metaphor, I'll give myself permission, gentle reader, following the example of my father-in-law, to apply the term to a plant. 

The plant in question is a variety of tomato. I have no idea exactly what breed of tomato, because it came up all by itself near one of my worm farms. I feed the worms with leftover organic cooking waste, and some seeds must have escaped.

The soil here is pretty good, and most things grow well. This summer has been especially wet, and the grass grows whilst you watch. The volunteer tomato did exactly that, after I almost removed it because I thought it was a weed. It was, actually, as a weed is defined as an unwanted plant that turns up somewhere you don't want it.

It grew like a weed, and flowered prolifically, much more so than the numerous tomato I'd bought and set up in hanging pots. It's producing large fruit which initially were spoiled by fruit fly until I applied some organic insecticide. 

We now have more tomatoes than we can eat. I'm looking for recipes for tomato sauce and chutney.

The volunteer metaphor works well, as the plant is sturdy, energetic, and resilient, a bit like the ahistorical myth as applied to national service.