This is Scraps, a monthly (ish, sorry!!) subscriber essay series.
The seeds were expensive, Italian, a variety of vegetable not usually available in supermarkets, and expensive where they are for sale. I don’t even like courgettes that much, I thought when I bought them, but they are reported to be easy to grow to the point of being uncontrollably productive plants. Everything I read about vegetable growing, online and in the books I bought enthusiastically as soon as we moved into the flat, suggested ways to process or manage your glut. As a baby novice gardener, what I wanted was easy wins. High reward to effort ratio.
A former downstairs neighbour, with sole use of the entire huge garden which had originally belonged to the whole house, once left a bag of unruly, overgrown courgettes – seemingly on the verge of becoming marrows – in a carrier bag outside our front door, unable to cope with the volume of the crop themselves. I was already at the limit of my short repertoire of reliable courgette recipes, having had several weeks of seasonal veg boxes full of them, and we were just about to go on holiday. After panic grating two of them and making fritters for the freezer, I ended up shamefacedly putting the last one, already soft, into the food waste bin for collection.
I planted eight seeds and six of them germinated. I was fascinated to see the leaf erupt from the seed itself, its shell clinging to one or two of my seedlings. The repotting stage, after a huge wave of enthusiasm for poking seeds into the lime green plastic capsule trays I bought at Poundstretcher, flummoxed me slightly. Did you need to repot them multiple times as they grew, or could they go straight into their final container? How many leaves should they have before they were ready to be transplanted? At what point should I perform the mythical “thinning out”, choose the healthiest looking sprouts in the capsule trays and abandon the rest, or repot everything and deal with it later? I never seemed to have enough compost, or pots, or stones, or time for potting, and so in the end the decision was made for me.
Two courgette seedlings were carefully nestled into my Aldi raised wooden planter, one in a grow bag, and the rest dried out and shrivelled in their tray before I figured out what to do with them. It quickly became clear that I had overcrowded the grow bag, and that seedling soon perished. Of the ones in the planter, one immediately dominated the other, shading its leaves and stem with its own and preventing further growth. I quickly regretted planting it here, because its enormous leaves (equivalent wingspan to an adult seagull) dwarfed the plants next to it. I tried to tend to the basil and chillies I had planted between the courgette at one end and the tomatoes at the other, staking them out and turning the whole bed round so that the other plants could get more light, but it felt like a losing battle, the courgette a cuckoo in the nest.
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