Are all those courgettes?
📷 by Eddie Pipocas on Unsplash
The packet had fifteen seeds in it. So I planted fifteen seeds.
This was my first year with an allotment, twelve years ago, and I hadn’t grown vegetables since I was a child. Fifteen little pots on a windowsill. Fifteen seedlings, all of which came up, because courgettes are obliging like that. Then fifteen healthy young plants going out into one of my beds while I felt quietly pleased with myself.
The old boys at the allotments would come past on the path and stop.
One of them asked me: ‘Are all those courgettes?’
Yes, I said. All of them. Proudly.
He nodded and walked off smiling…
The chap who ran the allotments was more direct about it. He came by while I was admiring them and asked whether I was sure I wanted quite that many? I said I was. He left it there.
I thought they were being friendly. Interested in the new person and her project.
Well into double figures
Then the plants started producing.
Courgettes are very, very good at making courgettes. Well into double figures every day. I’d approach the plot with a certain amount of trepidation, wondering how many marrows had appeared overnight while I wasn’t looking.
I gave them to neighbours. Colleagues. Friends. People I barely knew. We left heaps of them at the end of the plot where the public footpath ran past, hoping strangers would take them off our hands. I looked into selling them to local farm shops, which turned out to breach the terms of my lease. I googled every recipe on the internet containing the word courgette.
I like courgettes. There are limits.
Here’s the part I don’t tell as a funny story. That first year I had four working beds. The plot had been abandoned for years and I’d spent the whole season fighting it back to something usable, and four beds was what I had.
One of them was courgettes.
A quarter of everything I could grow that year went into a vegetable I ended up leaving on a footpath for strangers.
What I hadn’t done, at any point, was decide how many courgette plants I wanted. Someone at a seed company had made a packing decision, and I’d inherited it as a plan.
A whole year, planted all at once
A client I worked with a few years ago had just sold her first business and had given herself a year out. No financial pressure. Time with her family, space to be creative, room to work out what she wanted to build next.
On paper it was the thing everybody says they want.
She was struggling. Stressed, overwhelmed, and not enjoying any of it.
She’d taken the tools that had made her successful in business and applied them to the year. Time blocking, mostly. And because she wanted to do all of it, the blocks reflected all of it. Tiny slivers of everything, every day, and nothing she could get into properly.
Nothing on her list was wrong. Every single thing on it was something she genuinely wanted.
We ended up with a motto: ‘I can do it all, but not right now.’
That was the thing that worked. It let her keep the ambition and take the pressure off it at the same time. She went deep on a small number of things, stopped grazing, and started enjoying the time she’d bought herself.
She couldn’t have known a year of everything wouldn’t work until she’d filled one with everything. There was no way to reason it out in advance.
The work isn’t deciding what you want. It's deciding how much of it you want at once.
Five plants
Three is the right number of courgette plants for our household.
I know that with twelve years of evidence behind it, and I know it because I planted fifteen. Not because the chap who ran the allotments asked me if I was sure. He did ask, and it didn’t take.
I’ve had a couple of bad years for germination recently, where I planted five and got two, so I’ve been creeping the number back up as insurance.
This year I planted five. Every one of them came up…
So I’m currently back to looking up recipes, and anyone who comes for a coffee or invites me round for dinner should expect to leave with four courgettes they didn’t ask for.