Green menace

Last week, I regaled you with the challenges we have in getting along with another mammal. And now comes the beast in a botanic form...

I refer of course to that monster of the raised bed: Zucchini. Does that strike the same summer terror in your hearts as it does in mine?

Here is my story. When I leave home on these mornings, I very often observe a small squash on the plant, as shown here. In my mind, I am thinking: it looks a little immature. I say to myself, "I'll let it go one more day, and then it will be just right for a stir fry."

My friends, it's as if those giant flowers are actually ears listening in to my thoughts. Zucchini is plotting, is planning, in response to my culinary notions. It puts on the gas, as it were.

Because by the time I get home from work, instead of a summer squash, I am faced with, well, a Zeppelin.

I experience this as a kind of vegetable threat. A woody weapon poised over my head. Act now! After all, who wants to cook an airship? So I'm now pre-emptively harvesting. I spy a small squash and I grab it.

This brings to mind a dinner guest of ours from some years ago. It was another summer, and another year of battling against the onslaught of produce. Our guest happened to be a fellow gardener, and she commiserated with my plight. She asked, memorably, "How can there be world hunger and zucchini?" We all chuckled, but of course we did not have the answer. No signs of intelligent design here...

So, I plod along from summer to summer, idiotically re-planting the source of this problem, because, despite my complaining, I'm hooked on the thrill of a bumper crop. There: I've admitted it.