John Keller’s vegetable garden is a testament to the benefits of tending the same plot of ground, year in and year out. Not only is the soil rich and easy to work, but Keller’s garden offers up little bonuses that provide a sense of continuity from one growing season to the next.

During a visit to Keller’s garden last week, I spotted as wide a variety of volunteer herbs and vegetables as I have seen in a home garden for a long while. Lettuce, cilantro, dill, spinach and tomato plants had sprinkled themselves throughout the garden as reminders of previous years’ plantings. Volunteer lettuce and spinach usually result from leaving the roots of the plant in the ground through a mild winter while cilantro, dill and tomato plants spring from seed.

If you welcome volunteers, the trick is to recognize them when you till and weed in order to leave them intact. Gardeners who approach tilling as an excavation project, or who don’t like anything to seem out of place in the garden, don’t have volunteers. As it happens, Keller’s soil has become so rich that he can do most of his cultivation by hand.

“I own a Sears bone-rattling tiller, but the better my soil gets, the easier it is to use a hoe,” Keller said.

Keller’s 25-foot-by-65-foot garden is located in the Western Hills neighborhood of Lawrence, where the lots are deep and established trees throw dappled shade on the world beneath them. When Keller moved there 17 years ago, he was one house away from the western edge of the city’s development, which now stretches on past for more than a mile. In the intervening years, Keller has patiently nurtured his soil, adding compost and stable manure, and allowing his garden to develop a personality all its own.

While much of Keller’s garden is planted in rows, many of them interrupted or book-ended by volunteers, he also plants some of his crops in rectangular or circular patches. Keller’s sweet corn is planted in a circular patch, for example, and for good reason. Although he lives in the city, he still gets raccoons, and the circular stands of corn will be easier to fence off.

He also battles rabbits and has found a way to protect his greens and beans. He lays pieces of poultry mesh on the ground between rows, because rabbits won’t walk on it, but he’s also trying another strategy.

When a local business was getting rid of some portable store fixtures, he obtained several bottomless, four-sided retail bins, which are made of the same welded mesh as shopping carts and can be placed around rectangular beds of his crops. These sections of “rabbit fence” are easy to set up in the garden and remove, and provide an impermeable barrier.

At the end of the gardening season, the metal rectangles of fence can be collapsed and stored flat.

In addition to corn, lettuce, spinach, dill, cilantro and Italian green beans, Keller also grows potatoes, garlic, onions, beets, tomatoes, peppers, zucchini, bok choy, asparagus, Japanese eggplant, parsley, oregano and soybeans.

The table soybeans Keller has been growing for the past five or six years are a different variety than those used for field crops. Table soybeans are sometimes called edible soybeans, which Keller notes is a misnomer because field beans also are grown for food. The seed Keller buys is marketed by Johnny’s Select Seeds as Green Butterbeans and the plants require a 90-day growing cycle, so Keller doesn’t harvest until the pods begin to turn yellow in late summer.

“They’re a hardy plant, so prolific and the pods are easy to pick,” he said. “There’s not a lot of foliage between them and you. The plants are full of pods down low.”

Each pod contains three or four beans and Keller cooks them in their pods, which are tough and difficult to open for shelling. He cooks them up quickly in a pressure cooker, just a couple of minutes under pressure, before serving them, still in the pod. The beans then can be shelled at the table.