ZUCCHINI

By Willow Runningwater

I reached into the soil and scooped up a handful then slowly let the dirt fall through my fingers back into the planting bed. I brushed the soil off my hands. There was a red worm that I must have dug up. It wriggled around trying to dig down into the soil. A year ago I had some red worms in a container in a corner of this greenhouse, and some of them must have escaped into my growing beds. It was amazing to find one still alive. It survived the heat and dry soil of summer when the greenhouse was unattended.

Quiet permeated the greenhouse except for the muffled faint thud of heavy snow
falling on the roof. The season was late winter, and I was cleaning out and planning what seeds I would be starting for my summer garden. Lettuce was still growing rampant in the three large planters, made for just that purpose. The shelves were empty and brushed clean, ready for the pots with fresh seeds.

It was midafternoon and would soon be dark.

“How nice this looks,” I thought. “I’m going to take a break and sit down for a cup of tea.” Meanwhile I could leaf through the seed catalogues or the cookbooks I had spread out all over the table. Before the electric kettle came to a boil, I was immersed in a new cooking magazine that had many new zucchini recipes. There was even another new recipe for zucchini soup. How my taste buds remembered with delight the succulent soups I made last summer from that very vegetable.

There are many jokes made about zucchini and its ability to produce great
quantities, but in my household, zucchini is always a delight, no matter how often we eat it. I looked at the new recipes, wishing it were summer and I could go out into the garden and pluck some nice, young tender ones for tonight’s dinner. At this time of the year, the health food store had zucchinis that were soft and wrinkled, dull to even the sharpest knife.

I opened up the seed catalogue for about the twentieth time that day. I decided on what beans I wanted and looked to see if there were any different heirloom tomato seeds. I have always had success with the older types of plants. By coincidence before my eyes was a new variety of zucchini, called eight ball. It was round instead of long and baseball bat shaped. How interesting! I imagined all sorts of new recipes; stuffed zucchini, soup in zucchini shells… I knew I had to send for those seeds right away.

It ended up being one of the snowiest days that winter, but I found new spring life in the seed catalogue. Soon I would be starting seeds for my garden. I could hardly wait.

It wasn’t long before the seeds arrived in the mail. I also found zucchini seeds at the local gardening stores. I was obsessed. I carefully potted and watered them, even more mindfully than my other vegetable seeds. After all, I had all of these new recipes to try out. And so spring arrived and my plants grew and grew.

It was a warm and wet spring. The seedlings took to transplanting with a breeze. All of the conditions were right. My zucchinis were among the first in the neighborhood to grow into full-sized plants, and they started producing their succulent fruits. At first I picked and cooked with glee. The recipes proved to be the most delectable ever. Every night we ate zucchini with gusto.
Friends came and begged for some. Theirs were not ready yet. In Maine, winter is long. When summer comes, we pounce on fresh vegetables and never seem to feel satisfied. Talk shifts to what vegetables are being served for dinner instead of the weather. Recipes fly across the Internet, and summer magazines are filled with newer and better recipes. So my husband and I hoarded the first crop and then carefully gave zucchini away, making sure we weren’t going to be deprived.

I told a close friend that I would give her some of mine. She replied that hers were slow in coming and that she said a zucchini prayer, hoping that hers would soon appear. She said that she even spotted the tiniest formation of zucchinis at the base of her plants.

Meanwhile my husband bought a new fangled water sprinkler. It stood on three legs like a tripod, sending water all over the garden. He, liking new gadgets, turned it on at the slightest sign of sun, making sure that nothing would ever dry out in our garden. The water flowed, and the zucchini grew. Sue’s prayer worked, but unfortunately, it worked on our garden that had no need for prayers.

Every day my husband brought in a bushel of zucchini. We began to run out of friends to give them to. I think people stopped answering their phones when I called, or at least those who had caller ID. Sue took a few because her plants were still a little slow. I begged her to take her prayers back or find a better way to direct them to her garden instead of ours.

But the prayers held fast. My mornings were devoted to dealing with the bushels of zucchini that my husband brought into the house. I began throwing them to the chickens and the sheep, which would eat them if I smashed them. I made zucchini soup, bread, fried zucchini with cheese, baked zucchini smothered with pesto, zucchini in fifty-nine different varieties. Thirteen zucchini plants produce a lot of vegetables. Some got away from me and grew into baseball bats. I began to observe how long it took a zucchini to grow. If I went out one morning and saw a zucchini too small to pick, by the next day it was almost too big to eat. I cursed Sue.

My husband got tired of watering, and the zucchini took on a more normal growth. The plants began to slow down. We became content to eat zucchini for lunch and dinner almost every night. One can get used to anything. Zucchini became a way of life for us.

August arrived and lots of our zucchini were eaten up in parties that we gave. Then one day I saw the gray tint of mildew on the leaves. I knew that this was the end of the crop. We still had lots of zucchinis in the refrigerator to last until the first frost. The plants gave out some more but in a very limited way. We were exhausted from this vegetable that seemed to have no bounds about producing and producing. I was eagerly waiting for the first frost so I could be done with the garden. My canning was finished, and, yes, I even found a recipe for canned zucchini that was quite good.

One morning I awoke to see that fall had arrived. The zucchini plants turned a dark green and black, almost as if they were cooked. They hung limply in the garden. I was finally free! My time was devoted to painting and writing. I could spend long hours in my studio.

My only gardening chore was to plant lettuce in the greenhouse for our winter consumption. One cold day it began to snow. I was thinning the lettuce plants that by now had shot up and were eager to grow. I sat in the greenhouse and ran my hands in the soil of a large bed. “Gee,” I thought, “maybe there will be a new variety of zucchini this year.”  

 

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