Have you ever been in the position of trudging from door to door with a bucket of baseball bat-sized zucchini, only to find that the neighbors have mysteriously vanished? You could have sworn they were home. You saw signs of life only moments before, but now your repeated knocks yield no response.
Panic sets in. You are doomed to eat nothing but squash for a month. Yet again, you are the victim of a common gardener's plight: Too Much Produce.
If setting up a roadside stand or obtaining a booth at the farmers' market are not an option, a bit of veggie crop management may be needed.
It's challenging to be disciplined in spring when the lovely starter plants appear at the garden center. And of course the seed catalogs fill your mailbox in winter, just when you are at your most vulnerable.
How can you not want six kinds of squash, five kinds of green beans, four kinds of melons, several peppers, a few eggplants...you get the idea. A business colleague of mine confessed to me that he had planted 14 varieties of tomatoes. He claimed that they had "jumped" unsolicited into his shopping cart. When he got home and discovered them, he felt certain that a devious nurseryperson had planted them (so to speak) in his wagon when his back was turned and was probably laughing maniacally in the back room of the garden center. He wondered if I had any plans to make marinara sauce. I assured him I had my very own tomatoes, and I would be happy to furnish him with my recipe.
I've made my own over-planting mistakes. I've witnessed the sad spectacle of rotting vegetables hanging on the vine or littering the ground beneath plants that are clearly on the wane. How depressing this is, especially in light of what my slimy, shrunken
So what is an over-zealous gardener to do? I've yet to see a 12-step program for dysfunctional vegetable growers, but here is my own version.
Have a plan, and put the plan on paper preferably before those catalogs and nursery seedlings arrive to tempt you. Be realistic about what you and your family can consume. Many of the aforementioned catalogs provide excellent information on yields and days to harvest. Incorporate this information into your planning to make efficient use of your resources.
Practice succession planting for crops that are suitable, such as green beans and radishes. Pop the seeds in at weekly intervals to spread your harvest out over time. There are only so many radishes a person can eat in one day.
Get together with a gardening neighbor or two and agree to a produce-swap scheme. Maybe the neighbor grows the tomatillos and you grow the jalapenos.
Harvest baby veggies. Why pay a premium for those cute little scalloped squashes? Pick them early and often.
Thin your crops. This is often a difficult step for gardeners. All those seedlings came up, so how can you bear to yank them out? But I can tell you that two red onions planted half an inch apart do not produce very good results.
Don't forget to thin the fruit on your fruit trees too. Avoid that sagging branch with 300 walnut-sized nectarines.
Join or start a cooking group. Get together at weekly or monthly intervals to exchange recipes and cook a meal that incorporates fresh herbs and vegetables from the participants' gardens.
Grow the foods that you and your family actually like to eat. If everyone but you hates lima beans, they may not be the best choice unless you plan to eat a whole bunch of them.
And about that bag of zucchini? There's always the plastic bucket with the sign that says "free" out at the curb. If it works for old furniture, it has to work for vegetables.