There is a season in Oliver that no one warns you about. It arrives quietly, somewhere in early July — after the romance of spring has worn off and before the tomatoes get serious. I call it Zucchini Season, and if you have ever lived in a small town with a garden, you know the exact flavour of dread I am talking about.
Let me explain.
A zucchini plant is a liar. It begins so innocently — one gorgeous golden blossom, big as your hand, a fat bumblebee climbing in and out of its fluted petals like it owns the place. You stand there with your coffee, charmed. You think, “I’ll stuff those blossoms with goat cheese and have the girls over.”
Two days later there are tiny, finger-sized zucchini, light green and hopeful. Your heart leaps. First fruits! You feel like a goddess of abundance.
And then you go away for the weekend.
You come home to a forty-pound zucchini lying in the dirt like something that washed up after a flood. I am exaggerating — okay, by about thirty pounds — but when you’re hauling it to the compost it feels like forty. Nothing in nature should grow that fast. It’s a little creepy. One day: a delicate blossom. The next: a marrow the size of a Labrador. I am half convinced that if you sat very still in the garden at night, you could hear them growing.
Here is what nobody tells you: you cannot stop it. You cannot eat your way out of it. You will make zucchini bread. You will make zucchini “noodles” and pretend to enjoy them. You will grate zucchini into your spaghetti sauce, your muffins, and — God help you — your brownies, telling your guests it’s “for extra moisture.” You will run out of recipes long before the plant runs out of ambition.
And so begins the dark ritual of every gardener in this valley: the 6 a.m. doorstep drop.
You know it happens. You have seen the evidence — a paper bag of zucchini appearing on your porch overnight, like a vegetable left by raccoons with a guilty conscience. Nobody admits to it. We make eye contact at the post office and say nothing. Somewhere in Oliver right now there is a single zucchini that has been re-gifted four times and is slowly becoming sentient.
For years this made me a little crazy. I am, after all, a permaculture teacher — I am supposed to have this figured out. (I will also confess, very quietly, that one summer I could not grow a single zucchini. Me. A professional gardener. Defeated by the one vegetable that grows in sidewalk cracks. But that is a story for another day, and we shall never speak of it again.)
Then somewhere along the way the zucchini taught me something — the way the garden always does, the moment I finally shut up and pay attention. Abundance is not a problem to be managed. It is the whole point.
In nature, surplus is how a system takes care of everyone in it. The tree drops more seeds than will ever grow. The hen lays more eggs than she will ever hatch. And the zucchini — bless its overachieving heart — grows far more than any one household could eat, so the whole street gets fed whether it likes it or not.
So this year I have made my peace. I am not fighting the avalanche. I am grating, I am gifting, and I am leaving a basket at the end of the driveway with a sign that reads: TAKE SOME. PLEASE. I MEAN IT. And when a bag shows up on my own porch at sunrise, I am going to say thank you — to the neighbour, to the zucchini, and to a valley that still grows more than it needs.
If you would like to learn how to build a garden that takes care of you like that — overflowing, generous, a little out of control in the very best way — my gate is open.
Just bring a bag. You will not be leaving empty-handed.