When people think of the term "going to seed," they often picture a home or a whole neighborhood that is down-at-its-heels and is literally falling apart. But "going to seed" has an additional meaning for those of us who garden.

Some of my favorite flowers are the result of plants that replant themselves by going to seed year-after-year without any help from me. Among favorite "volunteers" that have taken up permanent residency in our flowerbeds (and in my vegetable garden) are larkspur, gloriosa daisy, cosmos and California poppy. Others are bachelor's buttons, calendula, hollyhock, Johnny-jump-ups, feverfew and several kinds of rudbeckias.

While many volunteer flowers are welcomed guests, others may cause gardeners to take in the welcome mat once they show their true colors. Truth be known, some volunteer flowers can become the bad bullies of your gardens unless you keep them under strict control. If you are ambivalent whether to allow self-seeders a place in your garden, the following pros and cons may help you decide.

The pros for befriending garden volunteers

Self-seeders can save you both money and time. Once planted in places of their liking, many of your favorite flowers will regularly reseed themselves. For just the cost of a few packets of seed, these free-spirited reseeders will give you the gift of their offspring year after year. No need to ever buy and plant new seeds again!

There's a saying about newly planted perennials: "The first year they sleep, the second they creep and the third year they leap." During the interim, self-seeding annuals and biennials can fill in the empty spaces between the small perennials with a bonus of much needed color. Once the perennial bed has matured, reseeders will often be eliminated from being crowded out.

Volunteers can serendipitously pop up in the most unexpected places in your garden. They often appear in places you would never have thought of planting them. This element of surprise often gives your garden a more informal, natural and pleasing look.

The cons of inviting volunteers into the garden

Unfortunately, many self-sowing flowers don't practice birth control. They simply don't know when to stop producing babies. Larkspur is a prime example. Their seeds often begin sprouting during late summer and often overwinter successfully. And when spring arrives, more new babies keep springing up faster than you can eliminate them.

Be wary when articles in gardening magazines and books say a particular flower is a benign reseeder. A plant that is a benign reseeder in one part of the country may be a highly aggressive reseeder in other places. Experience will teach you which self-seeders are exuberant. You must then decide whether to allow that particular plant to remain in your garden or whether some stern means of crowd-control must be enforced.

Volunteers have no place in formal gardens or with gardeners who are control freaks and insist their flowers march to the beat of their drumming. Volunteers seem to have a mind of their own and don't come up in neat, orderly rows just where they are wanted. Instead, they often choose to move freely about the garden. Worse yet, they don't always stay within the boundaries of a well-ordered garden.

Managing volunteers in your garden

Even if you are one of those gardeners who loves volunteers, keep in mind that you are ultimately in charge of what grows in your garden. Often you will need to be hardnosed and dispatch most of your tiny guests. You can also be a good neighbor and share some of your extra volunteers. Just be sure that you warn the recipients of your gifts if they tend to reseed promiscuously.

The following three techniques will help you manage the numbers of volunteer that are allowed to take up residency in your garden.

Deadhead! Deadhead! Deadhead! Keep in charge by routinely cutting off all faded blooms so seeds won't have a chance to develop. Near the end of the growing season you might allow a few flowers to set seed if you want to invite a few back again next year. Either let the seeds fall where they may or collect them and broadcast them where you want them to grow.

You can also control the number of volunteer plants by spreading several inches of organic mulch throughout your flowerbeds. Wherever you want volunteers to grow, rake away just enough mulch to allow volunteers enough sunlight to germinate and grow. Remember to replenish the mulch occasionally because earthworms and microorganisms continually break it down and eventually volunteers will manage to survive.

If you don't want any volunteers to grow in your garden, the above methods of crowd-control will work -- if you take them to the extreme. When using the mulching method, always keep the layer of mulch deep enough so that germination becomes impossible. With the deadheading method, be diligent and don't allow a single bloom to set seed. Even so, a few volunteer seedlings still likely manage to sneak through your stringent crowd-control measures. Jut pluck them out as soon as they appear and volunteers will never become a nuisance or problem.

* Gardening columnist Jim McLain can be reached at 509-697-6112 or ongardening@compwrx.com.