My poor zucchini

So, we had a garden this summer, which was only semi-successful. Since the plot of land recently used to be in a trailer court, the soil was not so much, shall we say, fertile? Anyway, half of the 15x30' plot was great: zucchini, pole beans, tri-color snap beans, eggplants, hot red chili peppers (as opposed to Red Hot Chili Peppers....don't even get "Dani California" in my head -- I'll go crazy at approximately 2am tomorrow morning), and cucumbers all had a hay-day and produced like mad for at least a little while. The other half produced, well, not much: my tomatoes were sparse, my green peppers non-existent, my watermelon was eaten by something else, my lettuce and basil didn't even bother coming up, and my experiment with tomatillos was a complete failure. But, hey, I had TONS of zucchini. Well, at least dozens of pounds, especially when I let them grow too long and they became mammoth, like scary zucchini from Giant Land. In the midst of my mourning for produce never to be enjoyed, I was consoled by the fact that at least I wouldn't have to buy zucchini for, like, a year. I even chopped, shredded, and sliced them, then dutifully froze them in freezer bags for future use, all the while dreaming of the enchiladas, zucchini bread, and stir-fries I would be able to make all winter. Take a look at all this lovely zucchini, ready to be frozen:

Then, the unthinkable happened. Somehow, the freezer door in the basement was left ajar....for at least a day or two, who knows how long. What I found was nothing but bags of drippy, water-logged zucchini that will almost certainly never be good eats. And remember all those blueberries we picked? Yep, blueberry mush. I nearly cried.

But, since everything was still at least cool, we cleaned out the drippy freezer and tried to freeze everything again. We'll see what happens. At this point, what's lost is lost.

Oh, and after cleaning up the mess, I shimmied up the front of the freezer, which apparently had been tilting ever-so-slightly forward on our sloped basement floor, so that the door now swings shut with a nice "thump." Hopefully, nothing like this will happen again.

And maybe next year, our garden will produce more than just zucchini.

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