The Squash of August

I swear it wasn’t there yesterday morning.  I picked our garden thoroughly and, especially, the zucchini.  I harvested six perfect squash which we used ourselves and shared with our neighbors. 

What remained on our four plants were a dozen ‘fingerlings’ – zucchinis roughly two or three inches long.  Cute little baby squash, still with their fading yellow flowers at one end.  They lay, swaddled among the leaves of their mother plant, in a kind of nursery.  All that was missing were little signs saying ‘come back in a few days…’.

3.6 pounds of zucchini

This morning, I returned to the garden and there it was.  This behemoth. The Gargantua of the plant kingdom.  A zucchini so preposterously large it couldn’t be real.  Yet, there it was.

For several years, we played a cute trick on our neighbors. They had a tiny vegetable garden growing by their front door… in too much shade.  It included a lone squash plant that barely flowered and never produced fruit.  And so, every morning as we returned from our own, sun-filled garden laden with veggies, we ‘salted’ their garden with some of our surplus.  Our neighbor’s two daughters would venture out each morning and squeal with delight at the bounty, never noticing that the tomatoes, beans, and squash were not attached to any plant.

But this guy was still firmly on the vine. While not exactly requiring the Jaws of Life to extract it, there was considerable grunting (on my part) involved to twist it out of its position without also removing much of the plant.  The other zucchini had grown by a predictable rate and will be a respectable seven inches long with a six- or seven-inch circumference when picked.  ‘Big Boy’ is 16 inches long and eleven inches around.  Per the photo, it weighs in at a hulking 3.6 pounds.  If it could box, it would be classified as a super-heavyweight.

Clearly, the zucchini are out of hand.
This is one morning's pick from
last week.

I’m sure that many of you reading this are thinking to yourselves, ‘for heaven’s sake, he just missed it… let it go already…’.  To which I respond that I swear it wasn’t there yesterday.

And science backs me up on that.  Or, at least it sort of backs me up.  According to the SF Gate website, given an inch of water a week, a zucchini can grow two inches a day.  And that’s in cold, damp San Francisco where the sun hasn’t been seen since the Giants arrived from the Polo Grounds.  Meanwhile, here in eastern Massachusetts, we were awash in rain in July, and the typical dewpoint for the past two weeks has been in the 70s, meaning you can wring water out of the air at will.  What should that do to a zucchini’s growth rate?  Triple it?  Quadruple it?  Easily, I think.

Finally, according to Food and Wine magazine this Wednesday, August 8, is National Sneak Some Zucchini Onto Your Neighbor’s Porch Night.  We’re already stockpiling bags of the stuff.  ‘Big Boy’ is going to find an appreciative home.