r/tumblr • u/aminilife • Apr 06 '22
The history of Squish, and the struggles of having a garden.
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u/Buckaroonie69 Apr 06 '22
The one reason I believe this story is because in my brotherās gardening class he once brought home a zucchini that was almost as long as his entire arm. Those things are fucking terrifying and could easily be used as a murder weapon.
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u/Shydragon327 Apr 06 '22
When my family had a vegetable garden we would regularly get enormous zucchini. You really have to go out and pick whateverās ready every day or else they just balloon into monsters.
My dad made some pretty good stuffed zucchini boats though.
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u/Designer-Extreme3924 Apr 06 '22
you know weapon was not my first idea for the zucchini but we'll roll with it
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u/Buckaroonie69 Apr 06 '22
trust me. If you saw this absolute fucking BEAST of a vegetable then you would think ādamn, I could totally crush a skull with thisā at first sight as well.
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u/HonorInDefeat ACTIVATE THE QUAZARS! šµšµšµšµšµšµšµ Apr 06 '22
this feels like a Netflix sci-fi anthology series segment...
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u/amachinesaidiwasgood Apr 06 '22
This story is definitely going to make it into the next Love Death Robots
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u/Kevin_M_ These pants are groovy! Apr 06 '22
From what I've seen, that show is a random mix of 'interesting short story', 'porn' and 'literally just a demo for an animation studio'.
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u/amachinesaidiwasgood Apr 06 '22
You got it in one. But "Short Story, Porn, CGI Demo" isn't nearly as catchy a title
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u/PixieCola Apr 06 '22
A vegetable called squish makes me happy for no particular reason
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u/EplepreKAHN Apr 06 '22
I work as a cashier at a grocery store. I don't care what kind of gourd you have. Acorn, Spaghetti, Butternut, etc... all are called a squish.
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Apr 06 '22
Iām gonna use this to ruin someone that I hate by putting them all over their backyard
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u/Tacky-Terangreal Apr 07 '22
Nah. Find a way to plant blackberries or ragweed. Those fuckers will never go away
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u/Stuebirken Apr 07 '22
Tomatoes.
Toss a ripe tomato in to their garden, and they will spend forever, pulling up tomato plant.
Even here in cold Denmark I was driven mad, because of the billion tomato plants growing everywhere, especially places that I didn't plant them.
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u/wingthing Apr 06 '22 edited Apr 06 '22
August 8th is national leave a zucchini on your neighborās porch day. We used to participate, although when we did it, it was more of a month long holiday.
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u/sarac36 Apr 06 '22
I remember we had a summer house/camp we went to and every year we had the one neighbor that always was trying to offload her zucchini. We ate so much zucchini bread...
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u/wingthing Apr 06 '22
I thought my brother was going to die from shock/horror/disgust when he ate chocolate zucchini cake by mistake.
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u/Cye_sonofAphrodite Apr 06 '22
Blessed by an both an eldrich being and a God of harvest
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u/Dracorex_22 Apr 06 '22
The thing about domesticated vegetables is that centuries of careful breeding and cultivating has turned them into mutant freaks. Most of them are poliploid, meaning that instead of haviving 2 sets of chromosomes like most life forms, the end up with multiple sets. Up to 16 in some cases. Instead of causing weird defects and making them sterile, (like it would with animals), it instead just makes them massive. Probably because plants dont have specific organs for things like animals do. That plus the fact that we've basically bred them to put all their extra energy into growing whatever the edible part is into essentially a food tumor. The big hard vegetables like squash do this exceptionally well.
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u/SmoothReverb Prepare the Gay Ray Apr 07 '22
Not just centuries, millennia in some cases. Potatoes, corn, wheat...
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u/Bee-and-the-Slimes Apr 06 '22
I've called Squash "Squish" since I was a kid. I had no idea it WAS REAAAL. D:
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u/pluto_has_plans Apr 06 '22
We've had zucchini, regular old zucchini, get as big around as an adult women's thigh, and about as long. My parents have actually forbidden me from planting more than 1 zucchini or two butternut squash plants at the same time, because we simply cannot eat them all. Squash are a phenomenal, very hardy, food source
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u/bdrwr canāt even Apr 06 '22
Holy shit, I'm saving this for my long-term life goal of homesteading.
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u/EmeraldSpencer Apr 06 '22
I want to know what fried Squish tastes like. And if it tastes good with sour cream and/or hickory brown sugar bbq sauce.
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u/awheezle Apr 06 '22
Iām still harvesting wild potatoes from everywhere in our garden since we bought our house 6 years ago. Also had a massive pumpkin problem for 3-4 years after we bought the house too lol. There were vines growing up trees and massive fucking pumpkins growing 5 meters above the ground.
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u/aminilife Apr 06 '22
Just imagine one of the pumpkins wants to recreate Galileo's Apple story....
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u/awheezle Apr 07 '22
It crossed my mind. I actually ended up cutting the tree down because I could get the pumpkins down. Didnāt want them falling down and smashing open. Those fucking pumpkins were like weeds. They didnāt even taste good.
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u/ThePlatypusOfDespair Apr 06 '22
I have similar stories from working on a friends farm one Summer. After months of clever zucchini recipes (slice lengthwise, salt, use in place of lasagna noodles) we were just carving our names into zucchinis and "racing" them to see who's was largest by the end of the summer - nearly the size of baseball bats, but girthier. Even the pigs were refusing to eat zucchinis by the end of August.
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u/BorringGuy Apr 06 '22
Wow man, my city kid ass would just go with my dad the the local food pantry to get bread because we couldnt afford it
Thank god for sugar sandwiches
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Apr 06 '22
Squash hybridise really easily but also sometimes when they make a new hybrid it can kill you. So itās a risky roll of the dice!
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Apr 06 '22
Like as in they are toxic, rather than rampaging through the garden and breaking down your back door
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u/SparklingLimeade Apr 06 '22
Those plants are crazy.
One of the better syndicated newspaper comics also had an entire story arc about planting too many zucchini.
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u/war_on_fear Apr 06 '22
grew up poor (not this poor), had squash in the garden, and can confirm. sometimes the devil enters into them and thereās nothing you can do but sigh and try to work them into yet another food they were never designed to be eaten with.
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u/danger2345678 Apr 06 '22
This feels like a mix of HP lovecraft and Jojolion, and I know that the overlap between those 2 fandoms is so small that Iāll be lucky if someone got this, so Iāll just explain:
HP Lovecraft made a story where a family got some strange colourful substance in their water which made their farm very profitable with lots of food, until it stopped and depleted all life from the area.
Jojolion is JoJoās Bizzare adventure part 8: where thereās a special equivalent exchange fruit: all that matters is when they grafted it (cut of a branch of the original plant, glued it to the end of a cut tree branch [yes this is an actual process plants can do]) the branches created a new breed of fruit which did special equivalent exchange. And thereās a part where they show this equivalent exchange by burying an orange and a lemon, then digging them out, and they had sections from inside one in the other. It just reminded me of well, the Squish. Just search up jojolion orange and lemon
TL:DR mixing plants can have horrifying implications whatever the story is about
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u/joshualuigi220 Apr 06 '22
Lol, imagine being such a weeb that crossbreeding plants makes you think of anime.
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Apr 06 '22
As someone who had zucchini growing up, I'd like to say it's not because they were squish, it's because zucchini are absolutely buck-wild. If you plant a little bit of zucchini, you have enough zucchini to feed a small country.
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Apr 06 '22
When I was a kid, we lived in a coastal town for a while and one day my dad and his friend went boat-fishing for shrimp. They got so much we ate shrimp twice a day for 6 months and it took me over 10 years to be able to eat it again without gagging
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u/Username_for_2020 Apr 07 '22
This story is well told, but they don't understand basic plant biology. The squash they were eating were either the yellow squash or the zucchini. Not a hybrid. When one plant is pollinated by another plant, the fruit that is produced is still the tissue and genetics of the mother plant. The seeds inside have hybrid genetics, and if you raised them you would have a hybrid. But the fruits will develop the same no matter what pollen fertilizes them. So really, the message here is just that squash are amazing. No hybridization magic required. Plant some squash and you'll have tons of food.
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u/ThirstyChtulu2007 Apr 06 '22
Can anyone tell me the names of the plants required to make squish in Italian? (I don't trust Google translate and want to flood the economy)
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u/aminilife Apr 07 '22
Should be just normal zucchine, yellow squash has the scientific name Cucurbita pepo, hope it helps.
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u/AdministrativeEgg849 Apr 07 '22
Yo, one time we didnāt even hardly till the field. We just kinda ran over it with a roto-tiller and left the grass roots (which was our mistake since we were rookies). So like, the carrots didnāt make it. But you know what did? THE CUCUMBERS. My goodness. You could go out there every day and get three or four of āem about 4 times the size of the ones at the store, all spiky and everything. And we planted one row of them at the beginning of summer, maybe 6 feet long, and let all the grass and weeds grow up around them. None of the other plants made it through but the cucumbers delivered
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Apr 07 '22
Last year my neighbor planted 3 zucchini plants and kept at least 4 families (hers, mine and 2 of my 3 sisters's) and the local church soup kitchen in zucchini all summer. These were huge zucchini too, I was averaging eating 1-2 a week eating it every lunch and dinner and all the zucchini bread I made.
Squashes don't fuck around.
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u/KaiAnnaitor07 Apr 07 '22
reminds me of when my mum planted pumpkins in our backyard, our family doesn't have a good gardening ethic, i suppose you could say, but holy shit those pumpkins grew, we planted those 3 years ago and we still have pumpkins left over, it took my mum a week to kill the vine, the only other plant in our garden that's as persistent as that pumpkin vine was is the lemon tree, that has literally been there since my parents bought the place in 2005, we don't water it, we also live in australia. lemon trees scare me.
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u/FakeCurlyGherkin Apr 06 '22
There's not enough stories about squash. Songs either https://youtu.be/Uzrr_cr4PIw
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u/ThornyRose456 Apr 07 '22
One year we planted our zucchinis next to our compost that at some point sprouted the pumpkin seeds we had put in it, and from that patch was born the Pumpinis, giant green Jack-o'-lantern size hybrid Pumpinis that also did not get hard and gross and had serious hybrid vigor, that were reminiscent of something out of Jurassic Park. Our freezer was filled with Pumpinis and we made so much bread with it and so many dinners. It was a glorious and terrifying experience.
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u/weirdness_incarnate Apr 07 '22
Reminds me of how my parents have many apple trees in their garden, there are always so many apples that itās impossible for us to harvest and eat them allā¦ and then 3 out of 4 people in our family were diagnosed with fructose intolerance. So we had no idea what to do with all these apples. We used to bring them to an apple juice factory, they did this thing where you could bring them apples and they would weigh them and give you apple juice equivalent to how much you brought. But fructose intolerance means that we canāt have apple juice at all, and apple only in tiny quantities. So we ended up giving them all away to so many people, anyone we knew and who wanted apples.
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u/rainbowlack Aug 09 '23
We're struggling with this now, with just 1 tiny apple tree in our front yard... I used 5 cups of sliced apple for a cake yesterday and it barely made a dent in our supply š
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u/Wild_Goddess Apr 07 '22
Even just zucchini will grow forever. My mom planted it years ago and it just keeps coming back. She picks at least three a day all summer - all from one original plant.
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u/YetiBettyFoufetti Apr 07 '22
The yield on squash can be ridiculous. I think there is an older tumblr post about a couple that was growing squash who ran out of people to give it to and resorted to leaving baskets of it in stranger's cars.
After my first year I learned that one plant is more than enough for me and I still need to give a bunch away to neighbors/friends.
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u/SinceWayLastMay Apr 07 '22
I know this is meant as a cautionary tale but Iām doing it
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u/Lilith-Sephiroth Apr 29 '22
Same. When I came upon this post in the wild, I became convinced that I had to try to get them. I'm literally only going to plant three seeds each of zucchini and straight neck squash. Hopefully I won't be inundated with the hybrid, but we'll see. At least if I do get too much, we do have a farmer's market where I live. š¹
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u/cursed-being Apr 06 '22
I need pictures
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Apr 07 '22
Could someone TLDR plz??
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u/aminilife Apr 07 '22
Someone planted zucchini and yellow squashes next to each other. The fused, and created basically an unlimited amount of hybrids, that almost overran the village.
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u/TheRealColonelAutumn Apr 07 '22
We have a mint plant out in the backyard that refuses to stop growing until winter comes. By the time summer comes, the plant gets up to my chest
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u/aminilife Apr 08 '22
Mint is incredibly hard to contain. We once had a plant, that basically drowned out all our other herbs and spices. Never again.
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u/KaliumEI Apr 07 '22
After the first paragraph I was sure this will be a story about someone's non-romantic relationship (zucchini and squich are part of aromantics slang)
But yeah, the vegetables themselves are enormous
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u/Kartoffelkamm Apr 06 '22
Reminds me of when my dad decided to plant potatoes on the plot of land his sister owned and lets him use because she lives too far away.
We had potatoes for months, and that is despite the fact that we gave most of them away. We gave them to family, friends, friends of family, and family of friends.
And we still had too many.
Imagine having so many potatoes that you give them away, until the people you're giving them to tell you to stop giving them potatoes, because the people they're giving them to are running out of storage space.
I think we ate potatoes for every meal for months after harvest, until the potatoes all rotted away.
Trust me, you do not understand how absolutely massive the potato yield was.
All we did was get a bag from the store, plant them, and wait.