The Attack of The Zucchini

Yes, the zucchini saga continues! I spent this morning baking some yummy zucchini muffins! I just shoved them in the oven. Only eleven zucchinis left sitting on our counter! Good grief!

I bet you thought I was exaggerating!

We have been more than happy to share our zucchini abundance with all of our neighbors. Since Ron and I have recently moved into Quaker Hill, the zucchini has been a nice ice breaker. It turns out we live in a great neighborhood with very generous neighbors. Perhaps too generous! It feels like every time we see a neighbor we have to try the new zucchini dish they made or try the zucchini bread that just came out of the oven. I swear the zucchini keeps coming back to us but disguised in different forms!!!

Our Garden

It has finally cooled down here in Connecticut and I have been braving the outdoors again. Yesterday was so beautiful that I spent most of my time in the garden. We have a nice sized garden that had been seriously neglected by me. I stopped wedding the garden regularly when the humidity and the heat were on the rise. Our garden looked like a jungle…as you can see for yourself.

Our Jungle

Our garden consists of an onion, pepper plant , tomatoes, and zucchini. I had never really had anything come out of a garden before. I grew up in a suburban community of New Jersey where the deer are very hungry! They’ll eat anything you plant in the ground. My family and I tried many times to start a garden but the deer or the rabbits would find their way in and demolish it all. So when we were planning for our garden I kept telling Ron to plant some more; figuring we would be lucky if one plant would survive.

All Clean

So you can imagine my surprise when our squash plants took off. I was thrilled with our first zucchini, it was my pride and enjoy. And then the zucchinis did not stop coming. Our last estimate was that our garden has produced about 65 zucchinis! Looking back, I now realize that we planted about 12 too many zucchini plants. We have been eating some sort of zucchini variation for dinner every night and I have also been shredding & freezing the zucchini (to make zucchini bread later! Yum!). Unfortunately, all our friends and neighbors are getting sick of zucchini and the zucchini is starting to take over our freezer (we still have enough space for 4 cartons of ice cream though…we know what is important.) I swear every time I finish a batch of zucchini there are another 8 zucchinis sitting on the counter.

One Massive Zucchini Plant

The zucchini epidemic got to a point where I was wishing the overachieving plants ill will. They started to turn yellow a couple weeks ago and all I could think was, “Ohh thank god. No more zucchini!” The plants are finally starting to slow down and I could not be more relieved. I think next year we will skip the zucchini!