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I've got a little compost pile that has been sitting for a bit, and all of a sudden an absolute ton of sprouts came up. I have a small garden and transplanted a bunch, but theres still wall to wall sprouts remaining.

So basically these vegetable plants in 3ft area are growing thick like grass, I'm thinking very unlikely that anything will fruit with that level of crowding, and I'm not sure what to do with it.

Off the top of my head I could just let it keep growing and see what happens, or I could shovel chop it all up and kill it so it composts instead of grows, or I could just cut and eat them like greens as they grow if they're all edible. Are they? Any suggestions?

Its mostly corn, cantaloupe, peppers, maybe strawberries. No tomatoes as far as I can tell so far.

Citizen
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Pepper leaves, hot or mild type are edible. I cook them up in the fall with a little lemon and butter in the microwave. Quite tasty, but not hot. There's an old book, IIRC, "Edible Leaves of the Tropics", that lists hundreds of such species. It's hard to find a physical copy, but may be on the internet now. I expect corn leaves and stem would be quite fibrous and unpleasant.

Edited to add: Book is called "Edible Leaves of the Tropics"; Franklin W Martinn, 1979. Here it is at Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/CAT83784383/mode/2up If you want a newer edition, Amazon etc. Has them.

It does give general advice about the usual dangers of messing with unknown Solanum. The version I've used contains Zero woo; ie it is trustworthy.

Wayfaring Stranger
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