Hate the wabbits, eat the squash. It's July in Iowa.

Gardening, it turns out, is an ongoing lesson in the fact that you cannot control Nature.

It's always in July that some switch is flipped, and the heat and humidity that is an Iowa summer comes steaming down. It's the seasonal trait that makes us known for our corn. Iowans wear shorts, sweat through our deodorant by 10 a.m., drink Arnold Palmers by the gallon, consider Dairy Queen drive thru a medical necessity, and try to move slowly. 

It's about this time, too, because of that humid heat, that the garden becomes more bristling with life than even the spring. The cucumber vines grow six inches or more a day. (It's true. I measured.) The lawn needs mowing every three days. Everything looks shaggy and a bit too much, like a woman who's only managed a single haircut in the seven months of this pandemic year.  (That would be the head gardener. That would be me.) Everything needs weeding or trimming or harvesting. 

I cannot control the rabbits. Heck, the rabbits cannot control the rabbits; their reproductive prowess is already legendary. I garden in a mid-sized Midwestern college town, where the term "urban" is used in the mildest of senses; it's no concrete wasteland. We have older homes set close together, but people have more or less landscaped properties and there are city parks with trees and paths through wildflowers and prairies. It's lovely for its citizens, but also for the rabbits, who take advantage of this as a 24/7 free salad bar. 

Don't tell me they're cute. I'm not buying it. With no real predators, they maniacally chew through my hostas, my lilies, my marigolds, my zinnias, my dahlias, my hydrangeas. The only reason they don't make off with the vegetable garden entirely is that it is a raised bed further topped by a two-foot high fence, a kind of horticultural West Berlin. Then the rabbits have flagrant, frenzied sex on my lawn, raise dozens of hungry babies, and the carnage to my landscape intensifies. Nothing seems to slow them down, and my early efforts to live trap them and relocate them was short-lived; they got too smart to fall for it. So now I have smart, hungry, sex-crazed rabbits eating and procreating, and I'm pretty sure they are laughing little demonic bunny laughs every time I come home from the nursery with more fodder (literally) for their evil world domination plans. Elmer Fudd sang about killing the wabbits. I wish something would; owls, foxes, hawks, and feral cats, where are you?

This was a hosta, before the toothy little mammals got to it. 

In West Berlin, er, the vegetable patch, I have summer squash. "Having" summer squash is not the same as growing it or eating it. Summer squash is a lot like life. It is easy. Until it's hard. And then it's really, really hard. And sometimes it's all or nothing, which also sucks. 

Starting squash from seed is ridiculously easy. It's one of the seeds they start in paper cups in kindergarten classes, because dirt + water + squash seed + sunshine = sproing! An itty bitty little squash plant. It lures you in that way, with its charm and simplicity. 

However, every other summer I have been able to grow zucchini or patty pan or yellow squash, I have had beautifully healthy plants with loads of blooms. Some of those years, the plant even gave me a squash or two, just to be a tease. To lift me up to that smug place where gardeners think, "I am a goddess of all things green; behold my produce." We are precisely at that point in this annual exercise of hope and, sometimes, denial. 

It is at this point that a tiny little caterpillar known as a squash vine borer is born, burrows its way into the juicy thick stalks of my pride and joy. I didn't notice the adult moth hovering over my veggies earlier. I definitely didn't notice the teeny little brown egg clusters the moth laid on the underside of the leaves. And then one day the entire plant goes limp. I think it's heat stress, but it's worse than that, the borers have demolished my squash vines from the inside out, and all those baby squash are not going to grow up to see my dinner plate. It is over. It is compost heap. It is maddening. 

Or, the exact opposite happens. Somehow, through a combination of old folklore (wrap the part of the stem emerging from the earth in aluminum foil), worried examination (is that brown spot an egg? Or is it dirt?), application of organic pesticides, pure dumb luck, or the laser beam of my focused anxiety, the squash plants somehow make it through the infestation, and thrive. They become the verdant version of the rabbits, and I am stacking up squash on the kitchen counter in disorganized pyramids. So. much. squash. We eat it grilled and in kabobs, sliced raw with hummus, covered in tomato sauce and cheese, sautéed with butter and tarragon, baked into lasagna, diced into vinegary salads, and yes, even made into zucchini noodles (I will not ever say zoodles, because I am a grown-ass woman and I have standards.) Every night I go into the garden with my basket, and return with more gold and green wealth, out of only two plants that are falling apart in the business of making squash babies. We share our squash with family. We share with neighbors. We share with friends. We share with coworkers. 

We don't share with the rabbits. To hell with them.