My worst (gardening) fears have come true. Our house is about to be eaten by a giant zucchini plant. It started back in April. “What are you planting,” I asked Katy suspiciously as she tucked her little seedlings into their soil cups.
“Cucumbers, tomatoes, lettuce, kale, and *cue ominous drumbeat* zucchini.”
Naively, she wondered if she could make them grow. It was like she hadn’t been at the numerous social occasions we attended where some pale faced gardener walked in (to a non-vegetable event) holding an armload of zucchini like it was firewood and asking if anyone wanted some. “There’s just way more than we need,” they would say, putting on a generous façade while we all wondered why they only brought one kind of vegetable to share.
So far this week, we’ve had zucchini bread, zucchini pasta sauce, and breaded zucchini mini pizzas because—why have actual pizza with real pizza dough when you could cover a vegetable with bread crumbs and have that instead?
As a testimony to what a good eater I was as a child, my mom overheard me telling Katy zucchini was one of my least favorite things to eat and said, “What are you talking about? We had zucchini all the time when you were a kid.” Awkward silence.
If we’re lucky, the zucchini plant won’t completely overtake the beds, and we’ll get one or two other vegetables this year.
I almost thought we’d made it when Katy said after the *third* zucchini meal in four days that we’d used up all the zucchini. Maybe, like me, she was adopting a strategy of eating something you don’t like really fast so it’s just gone (something I started doing when I was 8 and still do in my 30s). “Oh, no,” she said excitedly. “They just keep coming back.”
Like murder hornets.
We gave some to one of our friends who commented on how expensive zucchini are in the grocery store right now, and that they’re not very good, which is something I’d say about avocados, not zucchini. Happily, we’ve also planted an avocado seed. I’ve been told we can expect our first avocados in five to thirteen years. 🙄
Joel and Katy
#LiveJoyfullyDoGreatThingsCelebrateFamily
PS: Checkout this post on Facebook for LOTS of Zucchini recipes and to add your own! You guys blew us away with all your ideas. 👇