garden finds

Rummaging around in my garden the other day I found a few ripe tomatillos. This is the 3rd year we've had them, and the first year of any actually ripening. They came back from last year- most likely because I am a lazy gardener and left everything in the garden over winter. Clearly the seeds were incubated enough from the plant material to come back. I also found a tomato. Who knew?
We also had lettuce come back, and of course pumpkins of some sort.
Everything seems slow to mature this year, i hope we have some full size pumpkins by Halloween- assuming it doesn't freeze too hard. [Last year i planted giant pumpkins, only to end up with yellow squash.]
I had not really realized that leaving the plant debris would be enough for seeds to sprout in the spring. Denver- while it is fairly dry in the winter, does get quite cold at times. Last year our first big freeze was the second weekend of October, where it hit 17 F.
I recently visited a picking/ homesteading garden with my mother [you can read about it on her blog], in Boulder, where I learned that the owner overwinters her Zinnias by covering them with leaves every fall.

I'm hoping for some of these big flat red lovelies