The Mother Earth Gnus

This blog was supposed to be about stories. So far I've talked about politics, waxed philosophical, and just generally messed around.

For those of you who know me, this sort of conversational meandering comes as no surprise I'm sure.

So gather round, I've got a story to tell. It's a lovely friggin' tale about gardening, and the best use for certain vegetables.

Before I start, let me talk about comedy. My position on comedy is this: Someone has to take the pie in the face, or it ain't funny. Today the pie flies toward my Father. You'll all get your turn.

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My Dad, in addition to being a hyper competitor, was a child of agriculture. Whenever we visited with Dad's parents the subjects of conversation were maddenngly predictable. Even the order in which these subjects were discussed seemed to follow an unwritten format. Weather, then probable crop yield, then wheat prices, followed finally by which parcels of land were in the process of changing hands.

You can learn a lot about a community by listening to the small talk. Obviously, the folks that Dad grew up with had a set of priorities. Those priorities centered around two things: Plants and the soil necessary to grow those plants.

Simply saying that my father had a green thumb doesn't really do him justice. He was green clean up to the elbow. Some years his biceps took on a green tinge.

I don't know that Dad ever would have made a successful farmer, although I can't imagine him failing at anything he really wanted to accomplish. He describes his high-school motivations as "...anything that would get me off of that goddamned farm."

He spent the rest of his life trying to bring that "goddamned farm" to wherever he was.

He was always the kind of guy who would have a window-box garden in a New York apartment. Full of wheat.

The whole time I was growing up Dad was either planning, preparing, planting, or husbanding a garden.

Since no one plants wheat in a garden, Dad chose many of the staples: corn, potatoes, carrots, green beans, tomatoes, strawberries, and onions. But he also planted things that even Burpee Seeds had too much pride to offer: Kohl rabi, turnips, snow peas, and the dreaded zucchini.

Neither I, nor anyone I knew had heard of zucchini squash before the Carter administration.

Zucchini is like the Special Olympics of gardening. No matter how poorly you perform, you're guaranteed an award at the end.

Here's a recipe for a successful zucchini-raising project: dirt, water, seeds. Pretty complicated, huh?

Zucchini plants are beautiful. They have leaves that are a foot across, growing out of stems the size of baseball bats. They are the deepest shade of green. The blossoms are a gorgeous yellowish-orange, and the size of baseball gloves. Everything about the plant itself is beautiful and rewarding.

Oh... Did I mention that you get one zucchini squash per day? You do. Each squash is about a foot-and-a-half long and as thick as a kid's leg. They weigh about 3 pounds apiece.

One year Dad planted a single zucchini plant. It made him feel so "in touch with nature" that the next spring he planted 5 plants.

Of course, 5 plants yield about 5 zucchinis per day. Do the math: 5 zucchinis times 90 growing days in the season is about 450 zucchinis in a single summer.

Now, let me ask you a simple question: What in the Sam Hill are you going to do with that much squash?

If he had planted 4 more plants, he could have given every man, woman, and child in Enterprise, Oregon a zucchini as a gift.

I hated Zucchini. But that wasn"t important in the general scheme of things. Dad felt productive given the size of his zucchini yield, someone had to eat those nasty slimy things, and I was elected.

Well, to be more succinct, our whole family, everyone we knew, everyone who THEY knew, and unsuspecting tourists who left their cars unlocked while using the public restroom at the Texaco station were elected.

Hell, they had to go SOMEWHERE. Waste not, want not, right?

For some perverse reason, picking and storing these monstrosities fell to me. Hmmm... irony. The guy who hates these nasty squashes has to pick and preserve them for future use. I was tasked with picking, hauling, stacking, and storing all the zucchinis raised in Dad's ever-so-fruitful zucchini patch.

I hauled them into the back porch and stacked 'em like wood. By the end of baseball season we had a stack eight feet long and ten zucchinis high.

Mom was hard pressed to figure out how to use all these squashes.... Never mind the output of the rest of the garden, which was given away in recycled Safeway grocery sacks to anyone we knew, and on at least one occasion, a tourist who mistakenly found himself in our driveway after getting lost.

We had fried zucchini, baked zucchini, zucchini bread, zucchini cake, zucchini stew, zucchini pancakes, zucchini stir-fry, zucchini sandwiches, zucchini and SPAM hash, zucchini flavored ice cream floats, zucchini cocktails, zucchini teriyaki, zucchini wine, zucchini pie, zucchini on-a-stick, zucchini relish trays, zucchini every-friggin'-thing.

I'm starting to sound like Bubba in "Forest Gump" aren't I? I'm just thinkful that no one ever tried a "zucchini Pronto Pup".

I was sick to death of zucchini. So, being a devious little bastard, I worked to rid the world of zucchini. I had the best interests of mankind at heart....don't you see?

There was a big bottle of medicated tar on the back porch. It had been there for years. Dad had originally bought it to put on the wounds caused by dehorning a calf, but we discovered cauterization before we had much of a chance to use the tar.

There was also a huge 60cc syringe (which is a big'un) and a nice selection of extra needles.

One glorious day, when no one was home, I filled that syringe with that nasty-smelling tar concoction, and injected about 10cc's of tar into every zucchini stored on the back porch.

That evening, while preparing "zucchini Alfredo Tetrazzini surprise" Mother cut into a zucchini and found a huge nasty black spot.

"KARL..... Grab me another zucchini off of the back porch."

It was all part of my diabolical plan.

The next squash, and the next were found to have some evil-smelling rotten portions.

"I think these zucchinis are going bad.... Harley! I think the zucchinis on the back porch are rotting." Mom yelled at Dad from the kitchen.

"There's plenty more where those came from. Have Karl take them out and put them in the compost pile."

I don"t think I was forced to eat another bite of zucchini.... ever again.