A Zucchini Too Far … Not!

Jeff Green | Sep 25, 2013

Let’s start with an old country gardener’s joke. An urban hipster (we used to call them City Slickers but times have changed) is visiting his country cousin.

“Do you ever lock the door on your pickup?” the hipster asks.

“Only during Zucchini season” answers the country cousin.

The country cousin in this case is talking about baseball bat-sized zucchinis, fruits that should have been harvested when they were six inches long and were tender enough to eat raw, but were left too long and became monsters destined, at best, to be stuffed with rice, or turned into Zucchini loaf or maybe a racing car for the Maberly Fair. The worst case scenario for the giant zucchini is to become a dripping, rotting mess that is tossed unceremoniously onto the compost heap.

The story of Franco and Anna Esposito’s giant zucchinis is nothing like that. For one thing they are not really zucchinis, but rather winter zucca, or winter squash.

The seed for the single vine that yielded all three of the 40 pound hard-skinned squash in the picture below came from friends visiting the Espositos from Sicily, where they originally came from before emigrating in the 70’s. They moved to their property on Murton Road, south of Harrowsmith, about 20 years ago, and have been gardening there ever since.

“It was very wet this summer, which was not good for many things in the garden, but the zucchini really seemed to like it” said Franco, explaining how the squash grew so large. Usually the fruits from that variety are not that large at all, but this year it was different.

The fruits have thick flesh as well, two to three inches around the relatively small, seedy cavity, Franco said, and will keep until mid-winter in a cold room.

“None of it will go to waste,” said Anna, “the flesh is orange and you can use it for risotto, for pies, for soup, anything you want. We also roast the seeds with salt as a snack. And in the summer we eat the flowers off the plant. You can stuff them with ricotta, nuts, and herbs, and then fry them or do other things with them.”

Zucca are one of the plants that the Espositos grow in their backyard garden. They also grow enough Roma tomatoes to make dozens of jars of sauce, and beans for soup and fresh eating.

They also have fruit trees next to the garden, and this year there were so many plums that they pulled whole branches down.

Frosts this week and last have knocked down much of the Espositos’ garden, but dozens of tomato, eggplant, and pepper plants are still standing, as are three 10 foot high pole bean teepees.

“We don’t do as much as we used to because we have bad backs,” said Franco. “We used to have a second garden but we have down-sized. We even had to have our neighbour pick up the zucchini and carry them in to the garage.”