I didn't mean to do it. I went out to my veggie patch one day in August of 2020, and a gigantic zucchini had suddenly materialized. I'd overheard a real gardener say that, once a zucchini plant produces a single over-large fruit, there will be no more zucchini fruit from that plant.
I left that gigantic zucchini right in my veggie plot, still attached to its vine, to see for myself. I then watched the rest of the plant die over the next few weeks. By sometime in September, my veggie patch had nothing in it but decaying leaves, and one enormous zucchini.
I thought the fruit was cool, so I picked it and gave it a featured spot on a stone bench just inside my front door. There it lay for a good six months, unphotographed I'm afraid, through the coldest days and nights, seemingly unfazed by the winter air. When it warmed up, however, the fruit collapsed, became quite unattractively shmushy, and got tossed back into my future veggie patch.
I hadn't erected my Critter Control Contraption yet, and expected animals to find that zucchini tasty. Something did nibble away at it some, but under what little flesh was left, there was a woody layer that, apparently, the critters could not get through. I found it impossible to tear myself. Finally, I tried bending the whole fruit, and it broke to expose tons of seeds inside.
I found the nearly petrified fruit strangely beautiful again, and took some shots of it, then tossed it back into my emerging veggie patch, to mark the place I'd be planting one of the zucchini seedlings I had started a couple weeks earlier.
Those seedlings did not come up. 100% failure rate in store bought seeds for the second year in a row.
Just on a whim, I shoved a few of my desiccated zucchini's seeds into the barren soil cells of the non-emergent, store-bought, zucchini seeds.
Less than a week later, at least one seed is charging up!
I've snatched that desiccated zucchini back out of my veggie patch.
Unless another zucchini transmutes from some other dimensional existence into the three dimensional coordinates of my veggie patch this year, I'll be saving some of those seeds to see if they come up again in 2022.
Why not?
Presenting a Photo Shoot of a Desiccated Zucchini
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