My "Zucchis"
This was a first for me... the planting of zucchini, not from seed, but from an itsy bitsy plant with three tiny leaves. The nursery tag said "zucchini," so I took their word for it. I put these tiny plants in good, rich soil 18 inches apart, as instructed. That's what the tag said, so that's what I allowed, no matter how lost and forlorn they looked. I felt like I was putting babies out in the middle of a vast desert. The tag also said they would take 80-90 days to mature. Gardening teaches patience.Each morning I went out to the garden to check on how my little "zucchis" were doing. They weren't doing much! There they all sat for weeks not growing very much, but not dying either—so far, so good. Their neighboring veggie's were doing great however. I tenderly weeded them each day fearing the roots of the weeds would grab hold of their tiny zucchini roots and pull them down to who knows where.
Well, we had a bit of odd weather here on Long Island with some days in the high 90's and nights in the 50's, then 2 or 3 nights of heavy down pours. I was sooo tempted to rise from my cozy, dry bed and venture out to see if my young charges were still above ground. I resisted the urge and instead dreamed of big, fat, healthy zucchini. Finally, I had reached the point where I decided to ignore them. I did all that I could. It was now up to them. My attitude now towards them was "sink or swim."
It's amazing what can be seen in the garden very early in the morning. Whilst drinking my morning tea on the patio facing the vegetable patch, I gazed upon the good, solid array of soon eatable vegetables. There I noticed the prettiest large yellow blossoms. I wondered, "What is that?" and leaving my tea on the table, I curiously made my way over to it. What it was, was my little "zucchis" coming to maturity, just like the tag from the nursery said they would. "When did that happen?" I gasped. It seemed like overnight they had all agreed to sprout up with a sudden zeal for life. No more my little zucchis. They were now becoming full fledged, maturing zucchini. Soon they would become the "King Kongs" of the vegetable patch! The nursery tag did not say what size they would actually grow to. The 18" apart rule should have been at least double that. So fast were they growing that I had to move other plants out of their way for their own survival. I think they knew they were the largest, most ferocious plants there. Even the weeds buckled under their vivaciousness. They developed long, thick stems, which became encrusted with short, sticky thistle-like thorns. What had I wrought here? Less than a week later, I noticed so many small zucchini lying about on their bed of dirt with nothing more to do than to live up their promised maturity of 80-90 days.
The funny thing about all this is that I really didn't care for the taste of zucchini until very recently. Coming from an English background, and raised by a Scottish grandmother, they were not served very often, if at all. But the rest of my family loves them, along with a few friends and neighbors with whom I am more than happy to share my zucchini bounty with.
Watching these wonderful plants grow from tiny seedling to large sprawling plant with leaves a good foot in length was a wondrous lesson in botany. In Genesis 1:11 the Bible says, "And God said, let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed and the fruit tree, yielding fruit after its kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth and so it was." As I pondered these words, "whose seed is in itself", the verse took on a greater depth of comprehension. Each and every seed contains all it needs once planted in the earth to become a perfect thing of its own. A little sunshine, a little care, a little water, and as the phrase goes, "There you have it." Sure enough, a giant oak still comes from a little acorn. Jesus illustrates the wonder of a seed so beautifully in Matthew 17:30: "If you have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, remove hence to yonder place, it shall remove and nothing shall be impossible to you."
All this is just one of what God's precious seeds can do!
