Ever plant too much? Did you learn your lesson or repeat it?
Seems like everyone who plants zucchini feels obliged to plant the whole seed packet when they really only ever eat 4 during the season, and foist all the rest on unsuspecting neighbors (they leave bags on my porch with no indication of the perpetrator).
Tomatoes as well. Year after year they never learn how many they can/can’t use when they all turn red the same day.
Trees are different. I can’t stop my cherry and plum trees from overproducing.
But at least the overage is solicited from me by people at work.
Myself, I’ve switched almost entirely to things that keep in the root cellar.
Especially things that are expensive in the store like kohlrabi.
I once planted about ten Japanese cucumber plants. What could I have been thinking? I was harvesting bushels of cukes. Luckily, they were delectable, so they were easy to give away.
I’ve also overplanted basil, parsley, and tarragon. I always have way too many of those herbs.
Too many tomatoes? I understand the words, but not the concept. Not as long as I have a freezer and make pasta sauce all winter long.
Spring onions. I set up a window box last year with a handful of seeds in it thinking it would be a nice part-time hobby.
Turns out I am good at growing spring onions - I just don’t know when to stop. Instead we got spring onions over an inch across, and a kilo out of each flowerpot. After we’d given some to the neighbours, work colleagues etc, we still ended up throwing some out.
We weren’t sure how pumpkins were going to do in our nasty mostly clay soil, so we planted six vines our first year.
None of the neighbors had to buy pumpkins for their kids that Halloween. We gave more away for table decorations for Thanksgiving. On Christmas I carved one with a picture of Santa and put it out. A few days later I carved one letter per pumpkin to spell out “Happy New Year”. The remaining 50,000 got chucked into the compost heap.
The next spring the compost heap sprung forth with about 10 million little pumpkin vines.
Lucky for us, the voluntary vines tended to be either infertile or some kind of bizarre squash/pumpkin hybrids that would get to be about baseball sized then shrivel and fall off. I think we only had about three full sized ones that year.
Here, they feed the extra pumpkins to the zoo animals. The elephants particularly like to squash them. Pun unintended.
Zucchini also gets ridiculously prolific. I remember begging people to take some of my zucchini, often 5 or 6 inches in diameter. I didn’t know about the elephants then.
Back in the old days we used to keep a large garden/small farm at my grandparents. We were canning fools back then. We never bought a tomato the entire year.
Now we just grow at our suburban house. We never use all the basil, oregeno, tarragon, parsely or dill, but I don’t really worry about it.
We have tons of rosemary by the side of the house. More than we can ever use, but it looks fine in any case.
Last year I had 5 squash plants, which produced far more than we could eat into late November. The biggest danger was losing one of the eight-ball squash behind a big leaf. We had one grow to a foot in diameter, five pounds. We hollowed it out and served a sausage, spaghetti sauce, squash mixture in the shell.
From my compost I got spaghetti squash, which is far better fresh than from the grocery. There wasn’t too much of that.
About 30 years ago, I planted a whole package of cucumber seeds. They came up. My mother had the garden tilled (I didn’t know she was planning on doing it, and she didn’t know that I’d planted the cukes). Some cuke plants survived, only a few, but we had cucumbers for one of our dinner veggies all summer long, and we made several kinds of pickles.
Peel and slice cucumbers, removing seeds if desired. Drizzle with olive oil and good vinegar. Season with salt, pepper, and any other spice your little heart desires. Refrigerate for at least an hour. Serve cold. Sliced tomatoes and/or onions can be added to this dish. Very good on a hot summer day, it’s refreshing and does not need to be cooked.
