During the latter part of July I had been taking the older kids with me, and visiting the ward garden every morning. We have filled, many bags with weeds from the pumpkin patch, and we have started harvesting green beans and squash. But it kind of feels like we are the only ones going to work in the garden. I don’t know this for sure, but we have never seen anyone else there, and every time we are there we check on all the produce that is growing, and none of it seems to be getting picked, unless we picked it. We have been picking everything that is ready every other day or so, and we have been taking it home and planning meals to include squash and fresh green beans, but there is no way for us to eat all that we pick and really I don’t want to eat all of it. It came from the ward garden and I felt like we should do our best to share it. So we have been putting squash and green beans on our porch and asking the neighbors to come get whatever they want, but that just isn’t working either.
This morning when I was on Facebook, I noticed that a friend of mine from my home ward in California posted that today is “National sneak some zucchini onto your neighbors porch day”, and I knew what we had to do. The kids and I planned it all before Kyle got home from work, and when he came home we all got in the van and went over to the ward garden. It was dusk when we got to the garden and we knew we had to work quickly. We were only planning on picking whatever squash was ready, and then leaving but we had to keep the kids together too. On our way to our ward’s plot I heard Jeremy say “snake” as he pointed at the ground ahead of him. I had to call to some of the kids that hadn’t heard him and tell them to stop walking. We saw the snake pass across the path in front of us, and we moved on more cautiously. The older kids and I went to the squash plants, and I picked all the squash that was ready, and handed it to the kids to take back to the wagon. We FILLED the wagon with squash! Then we went home to get ready to start sneaking.
I stayed home with Lydia and Adam, it was getting late now and they were getting cranky, and I didn’t want them crying the whole time we were out. So Kyle took the older kids after we explained to them that we are TRYING to be sneaky, they cannot make noise or fight with each other over who gets to pull the wagon or who gets to put the squash on someone’s porch. They didn’t come back until they had distributed all of the squash. 🙂
This morning when I got on Facebook I saw that one of my neighbors posted a thank you to “who ever left the zucchini on our porch this morning” and throughout the day more of our neighbors that also received squash commented as well on how excited they were about finding that someone had left them squash too. I am glad that we were able to make so many people happy with squash that we didn’t even grow ourselves, and I am glad that all that squash produced by the ward garden won’t be going to waste as it might have if we had waited for neighbors to come get it off our porch. Considering it went over so well, we may have to make this an annual tradition! 🙂