Are you ready to celebrate the vegetable gardener’s biggest holiday? The OSU Extension, Lucas County office is celebrating the summer holiday of “Sneak A Zucchini onto Your Neighbor’s Porch”. Join us in this fun seasonal festivity on August 8th! Have you ever filled stockings in the winter, snuck money under pillows or hidden eggs around the yard? If so, this is the summer equivalent of those other folkloric happenings. The best part of this one is that it comes straight from the garden!
The only thing you need to do is provide the zucchini and sneak it on a porch …. or desktop or kitchen table or other site, depending on your recipient. We’ve changed up the holiday to include porches as well as other appropriate sites, like desktops!
Although it might be obvious to vegetable gardeners that if you grow a healthy zucchini plant, you have to find ways to use all of it, Tom Roy of Pennsylvania is credited with putting the event on the calendar. We’re guessing that this holiday was celebrated on many different nights for many centuries before he officially entered it onto Chase’s 1998 Calendar of Events.
All joking aside, excess zucchini from the garden is a good reminder that an overabundance of any fresh produce can be shared with local food banks, emergency food pantries and soup kitchens. Please remember to share only high quality fresh produce. If it is too ripe for you to use, it will not be useful to others.
Even if you did not grow zucchini this year, they’re selling local zucchini at the farmers’ markets! Go collect some zucchini, a toolkit and sneak away!
By Patrice Powers-Barker, Extension Educator
Reviewed by Amy Stone, Extension Educator
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