My parents jumped into gardening in a big way as soon as we moved to the farm. In the beginning it was not a hobby: the idea was that the farm was going to feed us, so growing lots of vegetables was critical. They had never had a large garden before this; the John Deere tractor was employed to harrow a fifty by fifty foot section of the field across the driveway from the house, a fairly level and fully sunny location.

They planted everything they could think of: corn, tomatoes, eggplant, lettuce, carrots, peppers, squash, watermelons, and the magic zucchinis. And the garden was terrific, producing wheelbarrow loads of veggies all summer and well into the fall.

But the zucchini story reveals how naive they were. The garden was so successful that they were deceived by the zucchinis. 

We planted them according to instructions and they came up and grew, and grew, and grew into monster 2 and three foot long zucchinis. My parents thought they had become the greatest gardeners of all time with monster zucchini. They brought some of these monsters to the local store thinking to sell them to the store, world’s largest zucchini!

And the store owners shook their heads and explained to my befuddled parents that, NO! You must pick them when they are small and tender, not huge and full of coarse pithy innards. Lesson learned.

But there were so many zucchini plants that a few of them would go unnoticed until they were two feet long, hidden among the giant leaves. So my brother Fred might carve the big ones into boats. We tried using them as baseball bats without much luck.

And my mother learned to grate the ones that were only a little bit too large and make a zucchini version of potato pancakes with them, mixing them with eggs and frying them up.

And cucumbers. We over-planted cucumbers and were taking bushel baskets out of the garden each week, giving them away wherever we could. But, of course, most of our friends also had gardens with bumper crops of cukes so they were hard to give away.

We did make pickles, but that only works for the smaller ones. And you can’t freeze cucumbers; they turn into mush when you defrost them.

So she took about 5 bushel baskets and donated them to the local hospital. You could do things like that back then. Today there are probably laws and health codes that would prevent such donations.

But we heard a great little story that summer: someone we knew had a family member at that Putnam County hospital for a week or so. He was asked how was the care, how was the food. He said it was all great except that they served everyone massive portions of cucumber at every meal.