Self perpetuating veggie plot - daft idea?

Try carrots - have a stone bank in our garden & have found them happily growing sideways in there!

Plus psb in raspberries which I've happily been eating

What about parsnips - can't get any fresher seed than self sown.

The main disadvantage as I see it would be cross pollination between the different things. Over time I'd expect you'd get less and less of what you expect. However if you've got the space and don't mind some disappointments then you'll probably get some good stuff.

Go for it Chick, it's worth a shot. I do it sometimes - but unintentionally!

I love that idea,

Can see a few potential "problems".
First is that vegetables tend to be the bit that grows and stores food so that the plant can then create the flowers and seeds required for the next generation. So digging it up, chopping it up and throwning it into boiling water kind of prevents it getting to that stage. You would have to leave some to go to seed deliberately. OK, many do anyway, and half the time the veg does it for us and we get annoyed.

If you left a couple/few to seed would that allow the build up of whatever pest attacks them? Meaning the seedling veg next season get attacked by a hoard of hungrey pests.

Next really is one of which grows the better: Veg seeds or weed seeds. I know which my money is on. So when you get these nice spring seedlings which are the veg and which are the weeds?

As mentioned previously there will be cross pollination and some seeds (most?) will over time revert to their wild counterpart. The wild carrot is not a nice long orange sweet juicy root. To get to these they have been selectively bred and still are in order to maintain them.

I don't pull anything up until I know what it is today I'm getting rid of fennel seedlings in the brasica cage.

Well worth a try!
I have self seeded flat leaved parsley and dill which self seeds.
Veg wise, I had had the odd radish coming up in unexpected places and a cluster of pea plants, presumably we missed a pod when gathering up the dead plants.

Be interesting to see the results!

Think it depends what you grow. As previous posts said carrots will cross with wild, all brassica cross with each other, as do radish, turnip etc as well & as for squashes, it's just a free for all! Peas generally ok. You'd have to choose which varieties of easy cross pollinators you wanted seed from & isolate from pollinators with e.g. netting, elastic bands on flowers - methods vary depending on veg. Things like peas, Jerusalem artichokes, potatoes would be fine. Since most seed is good for a few years you could save & just throw a handful at random on years you haven't saved that seed. Not sure if I've made any sense!

If you're willing to change your diet a bit you can add salsify (roots and spring shoots) and sweet viceroy (aniseed flavoured roots).

Isn't self seeding part of the permaculture ethos?

P.s.

Self-Seeding Crops You

Oh VC I'm doing this too!

With chard, spinach, Azrec broc, grain amaranth and kale.
Scarlet sent me some Mexican spinach so when that hatches I'll put some in there too.
Then I plan to bung in any scruffy little seedlings...you know the ones where you sow a tray, plant out the best and you're left with a couple of strugglers.

For weeding, I'm going to simply 'chop and drop' permaculture style so that the bed is consistently mulched and when I want to thin, I'll pull up whole small plants for me or the chooks.

This is the first real season for this permie' bed and so far its going rather well!
Its last years kale bed and it is the dryest raised bed on my whole plot. Many, many crops have failed in it! Every spring the soil level has dropped again...much further than anywhere else...and even the worms look sickly!
I've let the kale run to seed (the bees loved the early source of nectar) then just chopped them down and bunged a thin layer of compost on top.
Transplanted the last of last years spinach in there and that is just started flowering too.
Its actually not that scruffy with things flowering all over the place...wild maybe, but with a certain beauty!

So far this spring the soil looks to be in better nick.
There are a lot of slimies in there, loving the mulch I expect, and traditional planting always leads to slime covered disappointment. I'm hoping though that with twenty squillion seedlings the slugs will simply thin it for me and enough will grow on.

I think this is a great idea! Yes you might get a build up of pests etc but these things all manage perfectly fine in their wild settings with no interference. Survival of the strongest and all that! You could always leave it for a few years and take stock of it at that point?

What about involving herbs - they love to self seed - and then you'll never be short when you need them!

Can't see you getting away with it on the majority of allotment sites.................would be one of the tidier plots on our site though!