The Zucchini Problem

It’s that time of year when gardens everywhere have stopped being polite little rows of hopeful green plants and have turned into full-scale food production facilities. Tomatoes hang heavy on the vines, and there's nothing quite like picking one that's still warm from the sun, wiping it on your shirt, and eating it right there in the garden. Fresh corn is even better. There's a very short window between “not quite ready” and “why didn’t we pick this yesterday?” but catch it at exactly the right moment, slather it with butter, and you have something close to heavenly bliss. Green beans are coming faster than you can pick them, cucumbers are hiding under leaves, and summer squash has suddenly decided it has something to prove.

And then there’s zucchini.

Anyone who has ever planted zucchini knows you do not plant it casually. Nobody with experience looks at a seed packet and says, “I think I’ll put in a nice big row of zucchini this year.” That's the sort of thing people do once. The following year, wiser and slightly traumatized, they plant one hill. Just one. Maybe two plants, because surely that will be reasonable. You tell yourself you’ve learned from past experience. You are exercising restraint. You are being responsible.

The zucchini does not care.

For the first few weeks, everything seems perfectly innocent. A few nice leaves appear. Then some blossoms. You stroll through the garden feeling smug about your excellent planning. You might even spot the first little zucchini, about the size of your finger, and think, Oh, how nice. We’ll have fresh zucchini for supper in a few days.

Do not turn your back. By the next morning it will be approximately eighteen inches long and weigh six pounds.

There's something about zucchini that seems to bypass all the ordinary laws governing vegetable growth. Tomatoes require adequate moisture, good soil, sunshine, staking, pruning, and the personal approval of several minor agricultural deities before they will produce properly. Zucchini apparently requires dirt. Possibly not even that much dirt. I suspect if you dropped a zucchini seed into a crack in your driveway and forgot about it, you’d have fourteen squash and a problem with the mailman by August.

At first, you keep up. You pick the nice little tender ones and feel wonderfully self-sufficient. You sauté them with butter and onions. You grill them, make zucchini fritters and casserole. You bake zucchini bread, which is really cake wearing a vegetable disguise so you can pretend it’s good for you. You shred some and put it in the freezer. You find a recipe online for zucchini pizza and decide to give it a try. Nobody is fooled. “It’s pizza!” you announce brightly. Your family looks at it. “No,” they say. “It’s zucchini with cheese on it.” You even feed some to the chickens, who by now have started turning their beaks up at it too. And inevitably you miss one hiding under the leaves until it has grown to the size of a Louisville Slugger and is no longer technically produce. It’s now lumber.

Eventually you reach the point where zucchini is no longer a vegetable. It's an inventory problem.

You begin giving it away. At first you offer it graciously. “Would you like some fresh zucchini from the garden?” you ask the neighbors. “Oh, yes!” they say. That works once. A week later you try again. “No, thank you. We still have some.”

Another week passes and now you’re approaching people in the supermarket parking lot. “Here. Take a zucchini.” “No, thank you,” they say. You reply sternly, “I wasn't asking!”

Soon everyone in town is in the same predicament anyway. You can’t give zucchini to someone who already has twelve of them sitting on their kitchen counter. That’s like trying to give snow to a New Englander in February.

Desperation requires creativity. You take some to church. You place a basket near the door with a cheerful little sign that says FREE ZUCCHINI, although by this point the word free doesn’t have nearly the appeal you’d hoped. Everyone walks past it on the way into services. Everyone walks past it again on the way out.

Fine. There are other methods. This is why, during zucchini season, experienced churchgoers should lock their cars. If you come out after services and discover three zucchini lying innocently across the back seat, you have nobody to blame but yourself. You knew it was August. You saw the gardens around town. You left the windows down. Amateur mistake.

There is probably an unwritten code among rural gardeners regarding anonymous zucchini distribution. You do not ask questions. You do not accuse anyone. You certainly do not attempt to return them, because that merely begins an escalation nobody wants. You take them home, shred them into something, and make a mental note that next Sunday the car gets locked.

I have long believed science is overlooking the obvious solution to world hunger. Forget complicated agricultural programs. Forget trying to coax delicate crops into producing more under difficult conditions. We already have the answer growing beside the garden shed.

Zucchini.

All we need to do is figure out how to cross zucchini DNA with every other vegetable. Imagine carrots that taste exactly like carrots but grow with the enthusiasm of zucchini. Sweet corn that produces fifty ears overnight. Green beans so prolific you have to sneak them into parked cars. Broccoli plants capable of feeding a family of six for the entire winter.

We could even improve vegetables nobody particularly likes. “Would you care for some Brussels sprouts?” “No, thank you.” “Are you sure? I have four hundred pounds.”

Within a few years, grocery store produce departments would become unnecessary. One tomato-zucchini hybrid planted behind the house would supply enough tomatoes for everyone within a five-mile radius. Farmers would no longer worry about crop yields. They’d worry about containment.

There might be zoning laws. NO ZUCCHINI HYBRIDS WITHIN 500 FEET OF RESIDENTIAL PROPERTY.

Scientists would eventually lose control of the project, of course. One experimental cucumber-zucchini hybrid would escape the laboratory, climb a fence, and cover three counties before anyone noticed. National Guard helicopters would fly overhead while officials begged citizens not to plant anything from an unlabeled seed packet.

Still, world hunger would be solved.

And somewhere, on a Sunday morning in August, somebody would walk out of church, open the door of an unlocked car, and discover twelve tomatoes, four cucumbers, eight heads of broccoli, five dozen ears of corn, and one suspiciously large zucchini lying across the back seat.

Serves them right. They should have locked the car.

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Will the Real Sandy Davis Please Stand Up?

One of the odd things about being an author is that your name starts turning up in places you didn’t put it. Sometimes that’s a good thing. Sometimes it’s confusing. And sometimes you find yourself wondering whether you have accidentally become somebody else.

It started on a Facebook writing group called The Plot Thickens. They regularly post writing prompts designed to get people thinking, and one of them sparked a story idea for me. I developed the idea a bit and posted it in the comments. A man replied that he really liked what I had come up with and said he would read a book about the subject. Naturally, I was pleased. Writers are simple creatures. Tell us you’d read something we wrote and we immediately perk up like a dog hearing the cheese drawer open.

Then he asked, “Wait... are you the chaos Sandy Davis?”

I stared at the screen. The chaos Sandy Davis? Well, that certainly sounded possible. My book, Between the Fenceposts: Tales of Mud, Mayhem, and Manure, is largely about the chaos of farming and rural life. Sheep escaping, goats making bad decisions, chickens making worse ones, equipment misbehaving, weather refusing to cooperate, even a neighbor who was drunk and naked in the middle of the road, and me standing somewhere in the middle wondering how things got so far out of hand. If there was a Sandy Davis associated with chaos, I had a pretty good claim to the title.

So I replied that if he meant the Sandy Davis who wrote about the chaos of farming and rural life, then yes. Guilty as charged.

That seemed to settle it. Then he told me that someone had given a friend of his my book, but she hated reading and was going to send it along to him. Now I was thrilled. This is what authors hope for. One person gets a book, another person hears about it, and the book gets passed along. No advertising campaign. No carefully designed marketing plan. Just a book finding its way from one person to another. Grassroots readership. I ended our exchange by telling him to let me know how he liked the book.

And that should have been the end of it.

Except I still didn’t know what he meant by “the chaos Sandy Davis.” The phrase kept rattling around in my head. Was that how somebody had described me? Had I been mentioned somewhere? Was there a review I hadn’t seen? Had I somehow acquired a nickname without being notified?

Curiosity eventually got the better of me, so I did what any sensible person does when confronted with a mystery in the twenty-first century. I Googled myself. More specifically, I Googled “chaos Sandy Davis.” And there she was. Another Sandy Davis has a podcast called Chaos to Calm. I sat there looking at the search results for a minute. Well. That was unexpected. Apparently there really was a Chaos Sandy Davis, and it wasn’t me.

Now I had a problem. Had this man mistaken me for the podcast Sandy Davis? That certainly seemed possible. But then what about the book? His friend had supposedly been given a Sandy Davis book and was going to send it to him. Except, as far as I could determine, the Sandy Davis behind Chaos to Calm hasn’t written a book.

So whose book did his friend have? Mine? Someone else’s? Was there yet another Sandy Davis wandering around the publishing world creating confusion?

Back to Google I went, and that was when I discovered there are quite a few of us. Sandy Davis. Sandra Davis. Authors writing in various genres. I even found a Sandra Davis who had written fiction involving chaos, which did absolutely nothing to clarify the situation. Instead of solving the mystery, I had expanded the suspect list.

I began to feel as though I had stumbled into a literary version of To Tell the Truth. Will the real Sandy Davis please stand up? Except I was already standing, and apparently so were several others.

The more I thought about the original conversation, the stranger it became. He had asked if I was “the chaos Sandy Davis.” I had assumed he meant the chaos I write about. He may have meant the podcast. Then he mentioned a book. I assumed he meant mine. He may have assumed the podcast woman had written it. His friend may actually have Between the Fenceposts, or she may have a completely different book by a completely different Sandy or Sandra Davis. It was entirely possible that every one of us had been having a different conversation while believing we were all talking about the same person.

There is something wonderfully human about that. We hear a familiar name, recognize enough of the details to make them fit, fill in the missing pieces ourselves, and keep right on going. I didn’t question “chaos” because chaos fits me perfectly well. He apparently didn’t question the book because he already had Sandy Davis filed away somewhere in his mind. Between the two of us, we may have constructed an entirely separate identity out of perfectly reasonable assumptions.

The best part is that the story isn’t over yet. His friend is supposed to send him the book. Eventually a package may arrive, he may open it, and Between the Fenceposts may be inside. If so, mystery partly solved. His friend really did have my book, although I still won’t know exactly how I became connected with Chaos to Calm in his mind.

On the other hand, he may open the package and discover a completely different book written by a completely different Sandy Davis. I hope he remembers our conversation if that happens, because I asked him to let me know how he likes the book. At this point, I really, really hope he does.

Until then, I seem to be faced with three possible endings.

Behind Door Number One, his friend really does have Between the Fenceposts, and somewhere along the way he simply confused me with the Sandy Davis who hosts Chaos to Calm.

Behind Door Number Two, his friend has a book by some other Sandy or Sandra Davis, and neither of us was talking about the same person from the beginning.

And behind Door Number Three, the package arrives, he opens it, stares at the cover, and thinks, “Who in the world is this woman, and why is she talking about manure?”

At this point, I’m not ruling out anything. I only know one thing for certain. Somewhere out there is another Sandy Davis helping people move from chaos to calm. I may even need to tune in sometime when I’m having a particularly chaotic day. And, somewhere up here in northern New Hampshire is a different Sandy Davis who seems to have spent a lifetime proving that calm is highly overrated.

Enjoyed this tale from the barnyard?
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Hot Air, Not Fresh Air

I opened my email one morning and nearly spit out my hot chocolate. There it was in my inbox—the email every author dreams of getting. An invitation from Terry Gross to be interviewed on NPR's Fresh Air. She had supposedly read Between the Fenceposts: Tales of Mud, Mayhem, and Manure and thought my stories of life on a small farm would make an entertaining interview.

For about half a minute, I was already being interviewed by Terry Gross on NPR's Fresh Air. My biggest concern wasn't what I was going to say. It was what on earth I was going to wear for such a prestigious event.

Like most women, I have a closet full of clothes and nothing to wear. Actually, that's not entirely true. I have a closet full of perfectly good clothes that I've kept for the unlikely event my diet finally pays off and I lose enough weight to wear them again. They're hanging there in hopeful anticipation of the day I can once again button them without holding my breath. I just know someday I'll be glad I didn't donate them to Goodwill. Unfortunately, that didn't solve my immediate problem. Did I own anything that DOES fit me that didn't look like I'd just come in from feeding the chickens?

It was about then that my practical side finally wandered into the conversation. Why was Terry Gross emailing me from a Gmail account? That tiny little detail burst my bubble like a balloon at a porcupine convention.

I went back and read the email more carefully. It was beautifully written and surprisingly flattering. Then it hit me. They hadn't read my book at all. They'd read my recent OpenShelf interview and review instead. The glowing compliments sounded awfully familiar because they were little more than a reworded version of those. Whoever wrote the email had simply stolen OpenShelf's thoughtful observations about my book and presented them as their own. I have to admit, that's a pretty nice compliment to Justin and the OpenShelf team. Apparently, the scammers liked them well enough to plagiarize them.

They had done just enough homework to sound convincing without ever mentioning a single story, a single animal, or even one goat by name. The more I looked, the more obvious it became. Terry Gross wasn't inviting me onto Fresh Air. Some scammer was inviting me to become considerably lighter in the wallet.

A few days later another email arrived. Different sender. Different sales pitch. Same bait. This one came from someone calling herself a "Global Book Marketer & Discoverability Strategist." She assured me my book deserved a much larger audience and offered a complimentary "Book Snapshot" before explaining how she could help me reach thousands of eager readers.

Then came another one. Apparently, my writing career had reached the point where I was attracting professional admirers... all of whom would eventually want me to compensate them.

I never replied to any of them. Not because I was tempted to believe them, but because I knew replying—even to say "SCAM!"—would simply confirm that a real person had opened the email. Instead, I marked each one as spam and let AOL quietly escort them to the digital compost pile. From now on, they'll go there automatically. Then I wandered into the kitchen and raided the refrigerator instead. The leftovers were considerably more trustworthy. Unfortunately, they did nothing for my diet.

Looking back, I'm almost grateful for the experience. Not because Terry Gross never interviewed me. Not because I still haven't found the perfect outfit. And certainly not because those hopeful clothes are still hanging in my closet, patiently waiting for the day my waistline finally decides to cooperate.

No. I'm grateful because in the end, even though I didn't get an interview with Terry Gross, I did get another story. After all, when you're a writer, that's not a bad consolation prize.

Enjoyed this tale from the barnyard?
Don’t miss the next round of critter chaos — to get new stories by email, just send a note to sandydavis@aol.com or follow on Facebook.

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©2026 Sandy Davis | American Way Farm