Zucchini!

by Peg Cucci
My husband is from Brooklyn, New York.

He is not familiar with farming, either vocationally or avocationally. This has caused us some problems over the years, because he wants to grow things, to work with the soil, to literally put food on our table.
That’s how he dreamed up “edible landscaping” as a suburban farming technique.

When we bought our first home, which he cleverly noted was surrounded by dirt, he planted zucchini as ground cover along one side of it. He planted rhubarb stands where others might have bushes. He planted strawberries where others have things like ajuga or periwinkle. He planted asparagus in place of ferns. He also planted thirty tomato plants in place of flowers.

Growth spurt
But the zucchini was the biggest problem.
Zucchini is a perfect plant for a beginning gardener. It grows with almost no assistance. It produces lots of zukes and the zukes don’t rot if you don’t get to them right away. They just get bigger. A novice gardener feels like a huge success when harvesting a baseball-bat sized zucchini from his garden.

For the person with this plant all along the side of his house, that was a daily occurrence.

Dealing with zucchini from a dietary perspective was my job.
Zucchini has no flavor. It does, however, take on the flavor of that with which it is cooked. The hallmark of any good zucchini recipe is, “And you can’t even taste the zucchini.” Of course not. It has no taste. That’s why it can be shredded and added to spaghetti sauce or chocolate cake without substantially screwing up the recipe. It can be baked, fried, boiled, sauteed, or eaten raw. It is very versatile. You can trust me on this.

In the edible landscaping phase of our life I would have killed for a new zucchini recipe. I had done everything I could think of with the stuff and I still couldn’t keep up with the supply.

Motherlode
Every night after work Ed would go out in the yard and haul in another motherlode of zucchini. I had two small children at the time and they were in a “finicky” stage of development, so they ate mostly peanut butter and macaroni and cheese. They thought the zucchini was great to look at, interesting to experiment on and fun to play with; but there was no way they were going to EAT it.

I have a friend whose children eat brains. She is truly amazing to me. She has MANY recipes for brains, sweetbreads, liver and other assorted organs that don't pass for food at my house. Until she met me, I think she was unaware of how unusual this is. She purports to come from a long line of brain-boilers and her children didn't know any better when they were little. Now, they have developed a taste for brain.

Wow. It’s positively inspiring, isn’t it? Think of the possibilities.
But I was not astute enough to wean my children to brains OR zucchini, so I had zucchini TO BURN! That’s the next thing I considered, actually. But I was afraid the telltale aroma of roasting zucchini would alert my farmer to the destruction of his crops. I didn’t want to hurt his feelings; I just wanted to end the pain!

I studied the plant itself to see if I could intervene in the production of this vegetation. I noticed flowers on the plant and I began sneaking out in the middle of the night and yanking the flowers off the vines.
Without flowers, zucchini plants can’t grow any more zukes. My problems were solved!

However, noticing that I was no longer preparing zucchini fricassee, zucchini casserole and zucchini burgers, my friends and neighbors with gardens started donating their leftover zukes to us.
That’s another benefit of growing zucchini. It’s a great community builder. You get to know your neighbors in a hurry when you are a zucchini grower. You come to rely on these people to take the stuff off your hands.

After we were all acquainted, I passed along my flower suggestion and things settled down considerably. Then all we needed to figure out was what to do with the fruit of thirty tomato plants.

Runaway garden
If you don’t garden you can’t imagine the magnitude of this problem. If you do, you’re thinking, “What idiots!” We were really unaware of the ability of one small tomato plant to PRODUCE. They are awesome in their capacity. We had thirty of them.

Tomato plants look innocent enough. They start with flowers, too, and then grow tiny little green bud-like things. The beginning gardener is flush with excitement as these little nubbins start to grow. Then, all of a sudden, there are tomatoes everywhere; hanging, falling to the ground and rotting. We couldn’t pick them fast enough to prevent truckloads of rotten tomatoes from littering our yard. After a few days, we gave up trying to keep up.

That resulted, the following year, in volunteer tomato plants in the window-wells, in the cracks in the patio, in the lawn, in the neighbor’s lawns. I’m told by folks still there that Madison, Wisc., is overrun with wild-growing tomato plants to this day, and we left ten years ago!

We find ourselves, once again, in a landscaping mode. This time we chose inedible items for external decor, or so we thought. But we have deer in our yard and they are eating the landscaping.

I wonder if Bambi likes zucchini?

Peg Cucci can be reached at Cucci6@aol.com.

 

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