You never can tell what can turn up in a garden. Which is one way of introducing the functionality of maintaining a compost pile or two. It certainly reduces the amount of household waste that has to be put out for trash collection by a wide margin. And taking all that kitchen waste out to the composter results in neighbourhood raccoons anticipating regular evenings of celebratory feasts. What they have no interest in is left to decay and become dark, rich compost. And at the end of the growing season when we're busy cleaning up the gardens in preparation for a new spring season while awaiting the arrival of winter, is when we tend to empty the composters of matured compost.

That compost is then spread on the gardens at the front and the back of the house. Left on top of the soil revealed when we cut down all the perennials and tidy the garden beds, the compost will continue to rot, and eventually make its way down into the soil it enriches. The quality of the soil will be much improved and growing things will signal their approval by growing more robustly, increasing our pleasure in their presence.

And surprising us from time to time with what may come up, erupting out of that enriched soil from time to time. Most commonly, we're surprised by tomato plants growing in the most unusual places. Sometimes right beside the composters themselves, and sometimes haphazardly in places in the garden beds.

One year I discovered the presence of unusual seedlings that soon evidenced themselves as vines. I wondered if they were cucumber, zucchini, whatever, and nipped most of them, extracting them from their comfortable perches where they clearly weren't meant to be. I left one of them intact, and as it grew, helped it to climb one of the trellises that a clematis owned. It grew and it matured and then it began growing a gourd. It soon became clear that it was a melon. As it gained maturity it became quite large, so my husband enclosed it in a net that could be supported by tying it at that point to the trellis.

We went off for a week, and on our return felt convinced the melon was ripe and ready to be plucked. So pluck it we did, and then enjoyed a sweet, ripe melon for breakfast for the following two days. That particular phenomenon never did repeat itself. I did wonder what might have happened had I left the many other seedlings from the same source that appeared elsewhere, intact.

This year something else has insinuated itself in the garden. Beyond the many sunflowers that had appeared as a result of the mixed birdseed that my husband kept available for birds throughout the winter. I noticed what looked like foliage of an ornamental lily growing where the pine had been removed and thought how attractive an addition it seemed that I hadn't recalled planting there. And then my husband, who had spent many a summer working on his uncle's farm when he was a boy corrected me by identifying the lily fronds as corn foliage.

Where the two large stalks were growing there was an assemblage hard by them of other, less mature corn stalks, so I removed them and left the larger two. Which have grown progressively larger, though no sign yet of possible corn development. We think they're an attractive addition, and mean to keep them where they are, out of curiosity to see what develops.

Never a dull moment in any garden.