Zucchini Anyone?

Welcome free folk of Middle Earth!

I’m glad you’re all back for another installment in my continuing journey to build a Hobbit house! Thanks for stopping by.

I was diverted this week, my friends. I had forgotten I scheduled an eye doctor appointment for this Saturday. At 11 am no less. Probably the worst time I could have chosen. You don’t get a whole lot of choice when you’re looking for an appointment though. I’m so busy at work that Saturday was the only time I could really fit it in.

…….and as a consequence the Hobbit House suffers.

My eyes weren’t too bad though. I mean it’s all relative right? Meaning they haven’t gotten worse in the last three years. I just have really bad vision that’s all. You remember the eye chart they have on the wall at the eye doctor’s office. You know the one with the huge letter E at the top and then the rows of letters that get progressively smaller? I once said to the eye doctor, “Wow imagine if you couldn’t see the big E.” He turns and says to me, “You can’t.” I take my glasses off and am astonished to find out that he’s right. I can’t see the E. That’s how bad my eyes are. So I really need to go to the eye doctor…..at least every couple of years.

So I hope you’ll forgive me for not getting anything done this weekend. I really was a little worried about my eyes.

On top of that I had to go over to my mother’s house and go through my fathers stuff. You know his tools and left over odds and ends. Construction stuff. Wire, pipe, fixtures, tools and the like. My mother is trying to clean house so to speak. I don’t blame her. There’s a ton of junk over there that really needs to get thrown out. Some of the stuff my father had was crazy. Like he had 4 extra pressure valves for his well pump. I mean who keeps extra pressure valves lying around just in case one of them goes? Much less four of them.

He built this shed out back for his tractor. A real tractor that you could hook a plow up to and all. He fancied himself to be some sort of half assed farmer. It’s a long story but he would plow our backyard up out back and plant this huge vegetable garden every year. He liked watching the stuff grow. Then his wife and six children were slaves to the garden for the summer. It was fun! We couldn’t have a normal garden that was manageable. You know with 10 tomato plants and a couple of cucumbers. He had to plant 150 tomato plants. We had so many zucchini plants we could have fed the whole of Northern Italy. I’m not kidding. We would find zucchini’s that were the size of small cars in this garden……and then.

….and then my mother would find a way to cook these monster zucchini’s. I actually just found out that I like zucchini. I had it at a restaurant. It was very good. We didn’t realize you were supposed to pick the zucchinis when they were small. You know when they were young and sweet. We always let them grow until they were the size of watermelons and the seeds were as big as a human eye ball.

Just thinking back on the whole thing, it wouldn’t have been too bad if we, as children, could have dished out what we wanted to eat. I think that would have been fair. Everybody got the same portions more or less though……and my parents came from the school of “You’ve got to finish what’s on your plate theory.”You had to sit and could not leave the table until your plate was empty. Did you ever eat something that, and I’m talking about in your mind’s eye here people, that had the taste and texture of a human eye. Well that’s more or less what the seeds of these monster zucchini’s tasted like that we were  forced to eat every summer in the days of my youth. Put it to you this way: Zucchini night at our house was not a 15 minute affair.

Ah yes. The tales of a Hobbit Home builder.

A little off topic but I do miss the old man. The zucchini’s….. that’s a different story.

I’m going to go out on a limb here for next weekend though. I’m promising to make some sort of progress next week. The only issue is next weekend is Easter Sunday so I might have trouble putting together a decent post. We’ll see. I’ll get something out there for sure.

Well friends ’tis the begining of spring. We’ve come a long way since we started and I have high hopes for the coming months ahead. It’s really going to start shaping up. Very exciting.

See you next week!

Hobbit Hollow Jim

PS:Kind of went off on that zucchini tangent there and lost track of my original thought. In the attic of the tractor shed my father had all this electrical wire that he got just in case we built a bunch of houses. He ran a heavy chain  through all the rolls of wire and locked them together. Maybe it’s just me but most thieves, aren’t they looking for jewelry or watches or tv’s or something that you can make money on in the black market? It’s good to know that they would never get away with the 20 rolls of 12-2 romex wire we had in the shed attic.

We probably could have booby trapped the place with a couple of those monster zucchini’s! That would have showed them!

Ever get hit in the head with a 30 pound zucchini?

 

 

4 thoughts on “Zucchini Anyone?”

  1. Shall I send you some? Zucchini? Husband and I are starting hundreds of seeds with the idea of selling plants at the farmer’s market. What we don’t sell we will plant.and sell the fruit. (I hope we sell mostly plants.) Mostly tomatoes and peppers (zucchini too) – all heirloom varieties.

    Shall I send you some? How can you live without? 🙂

    Reply
    • Thanks for the offer Sally but I’m going to have to take a pass on the zucchini. My childhood years filled with zucchini was more that enough for me.

      Good luck with the gardening and the selling. Have a happy Easter too.

      Jim

      Reply
  2. Jim,
    I enjoyed reading. If I remember correctly, you forgot to mention the canning of those vegetables from the garden – the hundred jars filled with zucchini 🙂
    Mike

    Reply

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