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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