I have a small bed on the south side of the house that I dump in. It only has bulbs planted in it. This year I had a columbine and two hollyhocks grow in it. Plan on moving the columbine this fall. From now on when I dump I plan on putting the tag in the pile so I'll know what comes up. Perhaps I should just start a dumping bed!

I have to say I usually plant a sprout in the bed, even if I just get one. But I do recylcle the pro-mix, used it to fill pots and such. I chunk out the sprout, plant it, then dump the container of "dud" seeds/mix in a tub. More than once I have found sprouts of plants growing in a pot I have filled with that mix.

I dump IN, not OUT--into a bucket of potting mix I keep handy for potting up sprouts that are big enough. This is only my second year to WS but so far I haven't come across any strangers growing in the bucket or even in the pots I fill with the mix. I recycle and reuse the milk jugs as well as the growing mix after what I decide is a reasonable amount of time for the seeds to sprout. NB - what I decide is reasonable can change from one day to the next.

This spring, I thought I would use the potting soil from all of last year's containers to improve the soil along our fence. It's part of the empty lot next door, so I didn't want to spend any money on the area, but I use it for growing pumpkins and sunflowers. Anyway, yesterday as I was watering, I notice a nice little patch of portulaca growing amongst the pumpkin vines : )

I have three spots where I dump both ungerminated containers and soil left over in planted out containers. One is a spot next to some stepping stone steps on a short steep hill where rain runoff tends to cause erosion. This spring, three bellflowers popped up next to the steps and bloomed, which really surprised me because I would have thought the spot was too shady for bell flowers to bloom.

Dump spot two is a stoney, no topsoil area alongside the drive way. I was just tryign to improve the soil there, not thinking about ungerminated seeds. Imagine my surprise when BES and some other random sprouts showed up beside the columbine I had planted there. This summer, there have been a lot of surprise seedlings in the dump soil, but the extreme heat and drought have killed off most of them. So I guess I will have to have some extra containers just to "accidently" sown in that area next year.