I don’t really want your tomatoes. Or squash. Or zucchini.

For years I have reluctantly taken bags and bushels of over-produced tomatoes, squash, zucchini, cucumbers, corn, gourds, and various melons and assorted garden by-products from my neighbors and friends who happily planted a garden in the early Spring — albeit without a plan — all giddy with the thoughts of fresh vegetables at their table. I took their bags of vegetables and assorted garden crap party out of guilt, partly to be nice but mostly to get them to stop talking about how wonderful their gardens were and how they didn’t expect so much stuff (apparently gardeners forget about last year’s harvest.)

Not anymore. I’m done. Go peddle your fibrous crap to someone else.

Why the change of heart you ask? Well, to be entirely honest, I never really wanted any of that stuff. Most of it ended up in the back compost heap anyway after sitting on my counter for a week, getting in the way of everything. But this year, a few tomatoes rolled out of a bag and under a workbench in my garage. After a week in 90 degree heat and a stressful hunt for “what the hell died in here,” I discovered the mess. I have had enough.

I get the whole grow your own food thing, I do. When I was growing up, my parents (God love them, but they were Northern Maine, Depression-era farm folk) plowed about 90% of our backyard on an inner-city lot, to grow a Victory garden. For most of my childhood until I can remember, I was plowing, watering, hoeing, picking, weeding. I hated summer vacation.

We had three crops of okra, a continuous supply of tomatoes, two crops of carrots, cucumbers to beat the band, squash of every flavor… you get the idea. And my mom was a canning and food processing machine. Everything was either pickled, stewed or frozen, but none of it went to the neighbors. We had a converted closet on the second floor to hold all the jars from pickles to home-made catsup to spaghetti sauce to canned corn. In the basement, we had tomato ripening beds under blankets and huge crock pots full of cabbage being slowly made into sauerkraut. I was almost a teen-ager before I realized people bought this stuff in stores.

To all my neighbors who think that I am going to be their marketplace for excess vegetables, I say to you now for next year: have a plan! Learn how to can, pickle and process this stuff. Bake zucchini and pumpkin bread and freeze it. Learn how to make tomato sauce. Discover the wild world of pickling. It can be done. I’ve seen and lived it. And for $4 million dollars, I’ll teach you how to shuck, shell, process and pickle.

But I’m no longer going to be your excess vegetable dumping ground.

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