Zucchini

We didn’t grow any zucchini this year. I’m not sure if I’ve talked about it yet on the blog, but I have a love/hate relationship with zucchini. On the one hand, it grows really beautifully. It’s not hard to get started, it doesn’t mind being transplanted, and once it’s settled, it pretty much just needs sun and water. On the other hand, it grows too beautifully. Everyone knows that gardeners always have too much zucchini. I’ve probably given away more zucchini than I’ve eaten, and because I have a garden, I’ve eaten a lot of zucchini.

I don’t generally like growing vegetables that I wouldn’t already be eating. So, the mountains of zucchini bread and zucchini muffins, and ratatouille and baba ganoush and veggie lasagna don’t appeal to me. Those are not foods that I’d put on my shopping list. So why grow the zucchini if I’m going to have to force myself to eat it? I’m much more likely to use basil or carrots or even onions.

Zucchini is just so…extra. It isn’t coy; it isn’t sensitive; it knows who it is and why it’s here: to take over everything. It makes no excuses.

There are a lot of plants that are like that and many of them are considered nuisances. Tomatoes, mint, wildflowers of all kinds. (I once saw a review for mugwort that basically said, “Only buy this if you hate yourself, your neighbors, and everyone living within a one mile radius, because that radius will be covered in mugwort.”) I have a love/hate relationship with all of these. I feel such pressure. They need to be managed, the produce needs to be harvested, and most of all, they need to be pulled up and controlled or else they will take over everything.

And that’s pretty much how I feel about a lot of things in my life. My own dreams and desires, my kids’ wants and complaints, the general state of the world with all its competing factions. It all needs to be controlled or it will take over. And that sense isn’t wrong. One year, we had a pumpkin plant that was killing everything around it with its broad leaves and sprawling vines. I finally got fed up and in a fit of anger, grabbed a gardening knife and, in full view of the busy road outside my house, hacked the thing to pieces. It was destroying the entire garden!

But now, we grow our pumpkins in an out of the way bed where they can spread to their hearts’ content, without any limits whatsoever. And for what it’s worth, half of my pumpkins end back up on the compost pile every year, because there’s only so much pumpkin I want to eat. And that’s ok.

Why do I feel like growing the zucchini somehow locks me into a relationship where I’m not allowed to not use it? Just there, I wanted to write the phrase “not allowed to waste it” and maybe that says everything I need to say. I owe nothing to the zucchini and yes, there are probably starving children somewhere in the world who would love it, but they aren’t mine, because my children have eaten more zucchini than they would probably like to have in their entire lives.

Does it really harm the world for me to put the extra zucchini back on the compost pile to be broken down into fertilizer for some future year? Because what I’m doing right now is not growing zucchini because I don’t want to waste it. Is that better than growing a lot, using and giving away what I can, and recycling the rest?

 I don’t know what to do with the overabundance of my kids’ desires for the latest toys and fashions. I definitely don’t know what to do with the deep seated dream inside of me for a life with a little more space and time and a little less arguing over chores. But like the zucchini, isn’t it better to have those dreams and desires and then take what we can from them without feeling like it’s all or nothing?

I definitely have a love/hate relationship with zucchini, and apparently lots of other things. And maybe that’s not such a bad thing.