The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Well, here it is the end of the garden, nothing much left beyond a few volunteer pumpkins, some overripe beans, a crop of raspberries and way too many zucchinis. Say what you want about zucchinis, they are a gardener’s tried and true confidence builder. If the rabbits ate your peas, if the crows dug up your bean sprouts, if the raccoons tore down your corn patch before the corn was even ripe, if the tomatoes never ripened in a rainy summer, you can always count on the zucchini to come through with a bounteous crop of never-ending, fast growing squashes. No garden with zucchini planted in it can be considered a total disaster.

In the aftermath of a nuclear war, in a world where desolation and radiation prevail, you can bet your sweet bumpkin the garden will sprout with volunteer zukes. They will re-vegetate the earth, count on it. And if we have to survive on what will grow post-apocalypse, we’ll at least have zucchini. Coming out our ears. Probably mutated to the size of pumpkins and covering acres, just one plant.

I’m not going to go all Martha Stewart here and offer up half a dozen of my favorite all-time zucchini recipes. You probably got plenty of your own. I’ll just say that when the fall garden reaches the end and the green beans hang too huge to eat and the tomatoes are split open from the rains, you can still eat fresh from the garden, just roll up with the wheel barrow and harvest those zukes. You can put off buying the pizzas and the Hungry Mans for another month. So when you offer up some of the bounty to the neighbors, forget that slogan that friends don’t offer friends zucchinis. You’re just doing a small part of saving the world.

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