A Good Zucchini Can Save the World

Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.

Robert Frost

 This week my 19-year-old granddaughter asked me what “that huge plant right at the front of the garden” was?

Always alarmed at any threat to my garden, I asked, “Why? Is it dying?”

“No. there’s a great big something growing under all those leaves.”

I immediately envisioned that old black and white sci-fi movie, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, where plant spores fall from space and grow into large seed pods which can produce visually identical copies of human beings (gotta love Google!). That movie freaked me out, so just to be sure, I went out and double-checked. No aliens. Just zucchinis. “They’re like sharks,” I told my granddaughter. “They just keep growing till something bigger eats them.” She gave me a peculiar look.

“You mean like us?” Point taken.

I’ve been growing zucchinis for 40 years. I used to grow them because they would thrive no matter the heat, the drought, the soil, or even the gardener’s total inattention. They even seemed impervious to my husband’s mortal enemy: voles. (Five or six years ago, my husband ordered several vole traps from Amazon.com–yep, you really can buy anything online!  He spent his evenings stalking the yard looking for insidious little piles of freshly dug dirt—a sure sign of his cunning adversary. When I’d see him drop to his knees from my kitchen window, I knew he’d found a new tunnel and some poor innocent vole was not long for this world. Once it was dead, he’d hang its carcass on a piece of plywood in the garage, flaunting a challenge to future generations of the rodent family who thought they might get a free dinner in the garden. He may have over-estimated the size of a vole’s brain, but who knows? After he’d mounted a dozen of the critters on his “wall of fame”, he sent a very disturbing selfie to each of our children. It pictured him standing in front of his death and destruction display grinning from ear to ear. I hope parents had the sense to cover their children’s eyes.)

At the height of a good zucchini season, it’s a challenge to manage all the product that piles up in the fridge. For everybody. One warm Sunday in August, we had left the car windows down a few inches in order to dissipate the summer heat. When we came out from church, some desperate gardener had shoved four very large zucchinis onto the back seat through the crack in the back window. Truth.

And then there was the morning when our doorbell rang. It took a minute to answer it as I was in search of eight pairs of dress shoes which somehow managed to migrate into a witness protection program every Sunday. When I finally opened the door, there was a lovely Moses basket on the front porch with a note attached: Please give our baby a home. Tucked inside was a very healthy five-pound zucchini wearing a sweet little blessing dress and a ruffled bonnet. No distraught parent (or gardener) in sight.

With a large family on a skinny budget, by September we were always on the edge of despair. We’d long had a credo of “waste not, want not”, but there are only so many ways to trick kids into eating zucchini. We tried fried zucchini with bacon, zucchini bread, zucchini casserole, zucchini salad, zucchini dip, even zucchini ice cream—actually that’s a lie. Not even my husband and I could face that possibility, but I thought about it once.

At the height of our dilemma, a neighbor came by hoping we might take a few of her own pile of zucchinis stacking up in her fridge. My husband, who was sitting on the front porch watching our kids avoid the weeding he’d assigned them, laughed out loud at her. But he’s a practical sort, so he said, “There must be other uses for zucchini than ingesting them.”

“You could hollow out a big one and use it as a coffin for a beloved pet?” he suggested.

She countered with “We could slice them thin, dry them out, and use them as disposable frisbees?”

 Not to be outdone, my husband, who when not assaulting voles or building medieval armor, likes to devote some amount of time each month to worrying about the cost of the United States’ military/industrial complex, had a final brilliant idea. “We could let them grow all summer till they were enormous, then sell them to Hill Air Force Base for fighter bombing practice! It would save a fortune!” A suggestion with some serious merit. Zucchini bombs could virtually eliminate the threat of nuclear annihilation and think of the humiliation it would be for enemies of the state to have to admit, “We’ve been zuked!”

I’m heading out now to check that plant my granddaughter worried about; maybe give it an extra ration of water? It may deserve it.