Mother Earth's Garden

Every vegetable gardener knows that if you leave a small zucchini on the plant for a couple of days it will be a marrow. If you are mounting a harvest festival display, big zucchini look very impressive, but for eating, they are hopeless.

There are recipes for stuffed marrow but in my opinion life is too short to stuff any vegetable. Therefore zucchini must be picked quickly once formed. They do not freeze well, and must therefore be eaten within days.

It is true that freshly picked zucchini have a juiciness and flavor unmatched by the shop bought product, but all the same I have had enough of them. And enough zucchini cake too. And enough ratatouille, zucchini fritters and char-grilled zucchini dip. And nobody else in my family likes them. Not even in cake.

Today, inspite of my best efforts at regular and thorough harvesting, I discovered one of those enormous zucchini marrows hidden under the leaves. It was huge. I could hardly lift it. Goodness knows how many baby zucchini could have been borne by this plant had it not been devoting its energies to this whopper. I felt quite faint at the thought of all that water, and all those nutrients, locked up in and pumping their way around this overgrown phallic symbol in the rush to form seed before frost killed it off.

I dragged the marrow out of the vegetable garden and cut it open. Inside, it was beautiful. The flesh was creamy, instead of pale green or white. The seeds, which are little more than a channel of wetness in the smaller fruit, were fully formed, white and slithery. The whole enormous fruit was bursting with life and the urgency of reproduction. In just a few seconds, the cut edges were studded with little dewdrops of sap, so fast was moisture being pumped through this big seed-bearer.

I thought briefly, and in a depressed sort of way, about stuffed marrow, but I knew I couldn’t be bothered. I sliced the zucchini in half again, and again, and fed it to the compost.

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