gardening

It’s Taking Over: Zucchini time!

Aoife O'Riordan, , , , , , 10 Comments

I took a bit of a holiday last month. Visited wonderful people in London. Went to a wedding. Cried, copiously- who doesn’t love happycrying? Not me! Popped back home to see if the office had burned down. It hadn’t, by the way. Visited wonderful people in Scotland. Finally watched Totoro. Experienced Feels.

And all the while, my garden was left alone, my plant watering instructions to my housemates forgotten. In fairness, they were ill, and I wasn’t exactly reminding them, as I was far too busy lazing about in the sunshine and climbing trees and going to workshops and giving out about the ways in which people are terrible with people who are wonderful.

Then I get home. Two things have happened.

My strawberries have.. not quite thrived. This is Sad, but I managed to rescue one or two sweet, juicy, delicious morsels so all was not lost.  But my zucchini (pronounced “courgette“) plants? Oh, wow. Oh boy. Oh my. Like baobabs in a Little Prince moon, those leafy monstrosities (moonstrosities?) have taken over.

Picture of baobab (one of the image from "...
Picture of baobab (one of the image from “the little prince” by Antoine De Saint-Exupery) (Photo credit: Robert Scales)

A quick note, by the way: I have never grown courgettes before. My entire gardening experience, up till this year, involved windowboxes, herbs, some spring onions and the odd round carrot. I picked up some courgette seeds at Lidl a couple of months ago and figured I’d chuck ’em in the ground and see what happened. I did not quite know what to expect.

Also relevant: my courgette plants weren’t the only enthusiastic thing in the garden. I disappear for a couple of weeks, come back and weeds as high as my butt have appeared out of nowhere. Finding out what was going on in  my vegetable patch was less obvious than one might initially think. Far less obvious.

Here’s what I saw last week when I made my first exploratory investigation into the tangles of green. Two relevant facts: Yes, my hands are quite small (I prefer to go with ‘fun-sized’, though, ifyaknowwhatImeanandIknowyoudo). Also, though, the ngle I took this photo from does not do the size of that monstrosity justice. At all.

What did I do then? I did what anyone would do. Posted on Facebook about the size of my giant marrow, and left the thing in the ground to grow. For one thing, I already had a bunch of courgettes in my fridge thanks to Gardener Friend. Mainly, though? I wanted to see what would happen. Who doesn’t want to see how damn big a thing will get sometimes, y’know?

Here we get to this morning. I’m going to go outside now and take another picture.

…

Oh. My. YOU GUYS IT IS HUGE. Look!

IMG_20130809_113023

 

Apologies for the awful picture quality. It was tough getting an angle that did it the slightest bit of justice while also not getting attacked by prickly courgette leaves. Also, not in the picture it its also rather sizeable sibling, which, while not having achieved quite the same girthiness as this one, is impressive in its own right.

And here we come to the question. What on earth am I going to do with that? Should I leave it to grow and see how much bigger it will get? Should I pick it now before my garden becomes nothing but marrow? And how should I eat the thing? Should it become soup? Should I gut it and stuff it? With what? How many of my friends should I invite over to eat the thing? Should I start making new friends so we’ve a hope of getting through it? How many friends do I need for this, and so I need a bigger house to put them in?

 

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It’s Taking Over: Zucchini time!
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Jerkbrain, trampolines, gardening.

Aoife O'Riordan, , 5 Comments

Imagine you’re in a garden. It’s a sunny day. A big, green garden- shady trees in one corner and a great big lawn, tons of flowers and somebody’s cooking on the barbecue over by the house. You’re on a trampoline. You twist your ankle- or have you broken your leg? You try to get off the trampoline but you can’t find the way out. You know you need to stop bouncing but the door is gone, there’s netting all around you and everything you do just bounces you more.

You’re still in the garden. You love trampolining. Everyone knows you love trampolining. You know that you’d be fine if you could just get out of this trampoline and sit by the barbecue or under the trees until your ankle heals. It’s still a sunny day. Your foot is getting worse, you can’t get out, and you can’t stop bouncing.

It feels like that, sometimes. I’m in the midst of this fantastic life, surrounded by things that I love. I should be having the time of my life- but all I can do is keep bouncing on that goddamn ankle.

It’s not like that all the time. Eventually I find the way out, figure things out.

As you may have noticed, I haven’t been blogging as much as normal. It’s partially being stuck on that trampoline and not having any goddamn energy left to deal with messed-up things in the outside world. Partially that a couple of months ago I started a job and moved house and a whole bunch of other things in my life changed and working out what shape my new normal is supposed to be seems to be taking a while. Also, work involves sitting in front of a screen and when I get home all I want to do is anything else. I’m tempted to turn this into somewhere I talk about gardening and cooking and skating and all sorts of things that have nothing to do with keyboards. 

Speaking of gardening, check out these pics of what I did this weekend. With my bare hands (okay, there were gardening gloves involved) I turned this:

garden before

 

Into this:

garden sunday

Important to note there is the massive pile of rocks you can not quite see in the right hand side of the picture. Those rocks used to live in the Future Veggie Patch. They do not live there any more. Because ME.

 

Jerkbrain, trampolines, gardening.