Ok, so back when I was living in California as a wee chicken, my paternal grandafather of the Peach Tree Incident and my Mom got to complaining about zucchini. What posessed people to get and plant them every spring? They’re scratchy, always over-yeilded for the amount you could eat, didn’t preserve well and didn’t taste that good either.
“The only fun part is when you don’t see one of them until it gets huge and you go around showing it to the neighbors.” Grandpa groused.
“You know, I wonder just how big they can get?” Mom speculated. This being the Nineties, we couldn’t Google up the answer and didn’t have a copy of the Guiness on hand, so we couldn’t find out right away*
“Alright, since we both know we’re going to go mad and forget and get one anyway this spring, why don’t we have a little wager? You grow yours, I’ll grow mine, and the winner buys the loser dinner.” Grandpa didn’t like gambling, but he did like pointlessly fun compettitons and excuses to come see us.
“You’re on Edwin.” Said Mom, also a fan of jacknapery and her in-laws.
The following March, the first debate broke out about whether they both needed to start from the same type of zucchini, as a measure of skill, or if picking out the correct breed of zucchini was a measure of skill in itself. They ended up putting different breeds into the ground, one in my front yard in Mountain Veiw, at the base of the Avocado tree (”Maybe it’ll discourage Mrs. McGurkey from filching my Avocados.” Mom speculated. It did not.) and the other in Salinas.
Both sites were blessed with abundant sunshine, good municipal water and some of the best agricultural dirt on earth- Salinas is a former river delta and our house was built on top of what used to be a duck farm, and was practically reeking of nitrogen. In additon to this, Mom and Grandpa plied every known vegetable growing trick to encourage the largest Zucchini possible- limiting the total number of fruits for the plant to invest in by pinching off blossoms until there were only 3 or 4 zucchini (one needed spares, in case of accidents), doses of sugar water injected into the stems, Standing outside and verbally menacing the plant when it looked like it wasn’t putting enough effort in.
When a clear champion began to emerge from our plant, lovingly named “Floyd”, Mom dug a trough to encourage it to keep growing, and avoid scarring by growing over other stems or the hose. Grandpa chose to hang “Richard”, in hopes that gravity would encourage it. All summer was phone calls back and forth, and visits to eyeball the compettition. Tips and methods were exchanged in mock-interrogations and jokes were cracked about appearing in the night to kidnap the compettion. Mom even got me and my sister Kid night-goggles to practice snaking around in the yard after dark with. They didn’t DO anything besides make us feel Supremely Cool.
Come September, the two fruits had grown to spectacular size- sugar water didn’t seem to make much of a differnce, but plentiful water in general did. and the matter of when the measuring would take place came up. Costal California doesn’t really get frosts, but the measuring had to be taken at some point. I was decided that since my grandparents would be coming up for my Birthday in mid-October anyway, the measuring would take place then.
Mom’s was Four feet and Four inches long, (which happened to be my exact height that year), had a diameter of Five and ¼ inches at it’s widest point, and weighed 22 and a half pounds, a deep purple-green with an attractive pale sun-spotting.
Grandpas was four foot eight, had a diameter of Four and ¾ inches at it’s widest and weighed 20.1 pounds. It was a long, lean forest green with prickly hairs as long as eyelashes
I remember because in all the preperations for the measuring, Mom and Grandpa had never actually agreed on HOW they were measuring the Zucchini. Richard had the length, but Floyd had the heft. A Bottle of wine was opened and jokes were made about the merits of Length vs Girth that I would accidentally repeat in school the following week and poor Mrs Kivley would call demanding a parent-teacher conference.
My Dad, ever the enginner, eventually determined the volume and density of each Zucchini, and Floyd was declared the winner. (roughly 1100 cubic inches and 920 cubic inches respectively).
“So what are you actually going to do with these things?” Dad asked. “I’ve reached my limit on Zucchini bread already and I have no idea if these are good eating at this size.”
There was a hestiation in the party, both at the question and becuase Mazel the dog had gotten onto the table to eat my cake. I, being 7 at the time, began to bawl, becuase Floyd and I had become very good friends over the summer, and becuase I despised Zucchini bread. My sister also began to cry in solidarity, and this was enough to convince Mazel to abandon her Death By Chocolate and come comfort us.
“…Do they float?” Mom asked, once things had quieted down slightly.
“Yes, why?’ asked my dad.
“Well, supposing we carve the top third of Floyd off and then hollow him out a bit, then Halve Richard and put him on the sides… I think they’re sturdy enough to make an outrigger Canoe out of.”
Which is Precisely what we did the next day, which required the use of a table saw becuase Zucchini will get dense like a winter squash if allowed to mature. the canoe was crafted entirely of the two Mega Zucchini and a passenger was fashioned from a third, smaller Zucchini that had been found lucking in the leaves that morning. He was named Peter Johnson.
I had a lot of Parent-teacher conferences as a child.
Mom graciously agreed to take the lot of us out to dinner at The Whole Enchilada in Moss Landing, and made sure to get a table facing the harbor, into which Captain Peter Johnson and the Zucchini Canoe were released, much to the delight of the staff, and the confusion of a dozen seagulls that were hoping for something more calorie-intense than raw veg, and the dismay of one overexcited pelican that dive-bombed the craft and sunk it before it could leave harbour.
You’ve not known funny until you’ve watched a baffled pelican tilt it’s head over to disloge a tiny zucchini man from it’s gullet, and peck at it, bewlidered and dismayed for a good ten minutes, before delicately kicking it off the dock with a webbed foot in disgust.
*7ft and 10.3 inches, weighing in at 64.8 lbs, grown by a Mr.Gurdial Singh Kanwal of Brampton, Ontario in 2005. IDK what the previous record-holder got to, but Mr.Kanwal’s specimen sounds like it could have been made into a proper Kyak!
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