I’m a city girl exiled to
the suburbs. I’m much more comfortable in a concrete environment with mass
transit than the land of malls and minivans. Maybe that’s the reason I have two
black thumbs. With few exceptions, plants see me coming and commit suicide
rather than suffer a prolonged death at my hands.
Heaven knows, I’ve tried to
develop a green thumb, but I swear there’s a conspiracy in the Garden State. Whatever
I don’t kill, the squirrels devour. Along the squirrel grapevine the word is
out; my address is passed from varmint to varmint. They hold conventions in my
driveway and feast on whatever I dare to plant, leaving my neighbors’ gardens
full of flowers and produce but mine bare.
One morning I looked out my
kitchen window to find a squirrel perched on my gas grill, a green tomato
between his thieving paws. I went outside to shoo the little bugger away and check
my two tomato plants that the day before had been loaded with green tomatoes. Every
single tomato had been yanked from the vine, chomped a few times, then
discarded in the dirt.
But every year hope sprang
eternal, and I headed to the garden center for the makings of a vegetable
garden. Finally, after years of gardening frustration I discovered the one
plant that both defied my black thumbs and the squirrels—zucchini. The first
time I planted zucchini, I made the mistake of planting three, figuring that if
the garden gods were smiling down on me, one plant might survive. All three not
only survived but thrived. And that’s a heck of a lot of zucchini.
The strange thing about
zucchini is its rate of growth. In the morning it’s the size of your pinkie
finger, and by evening it’s big enough to feed your teenager’s football team. There
are only so many ways you can disguise a zucchini and fool your family into
believing they’re eating something other than those green things taking over
the backyard. So that first year I wound up giving away a lot of zucchini.
The garden gods continued to
smile down on me until a few years ago when all of a sudden they turned their
backs on me. I was used to picking zucchini out of my backyard, not the produce
aisle of the supermarket. A fluke, I decided. Wouldn’t happen next year. But it
did. And the year after that. For the past three summers I’ve harvested next to
nothing--one or two zucchini at most. Which makes for very expensive zucchini
when you add up everything I spend at the garden center to grow those plants. I
decided to give up.
Then this past fall the one
remaining tree on my property that hadn’t succumbed to old age, blight, or
Super Storm Sandy, departed for that great arboretum in the sky. While at the
garden center, searching for an inexpensive replacement, the horticulturist
asked, “How’s your zucchini this year?”
He nearly brought me to
tears. I missed my zucchini—the one plant that used to thrive in spite of me.
He told me to cheer up. The bees were back.
Bees? Well, it turns out the
reason I hadn’t grown any zucchini the last three years was that the honeybees
had flown the coop. My zucchini wasn’t being pollinated. The horticulturist
said the honeybees were coming back, and I should definitely plant some
zucchini this spring and dust off all my zucchini recipes.
So if spring ever arrives in New Jersey this year,
I’ll give zucchini one more try, but I’m hedging my bets. Along with sending up
prayers to the garden gods, I’m offering some to the honeybee gods as well.
We’ll see if come harvest time, my prayers are answered.
