I’m a good cook and no doubt you’re a good cook, but there are a lot of gardeners out there for whom growing vegetables is an occasion for creating horrid concoctions, about which the best that can be said is that they use up all the Brussels sprouts.

Everyone knows someone like this: he or she clips recipes from gardening magazines (this is equivalent to gleaning medical advice from Vanity Fair, or personal grooming tips from The Atlantic Monthly), then pulls out the file looking for ideas to adapt to fit the current harvest.

Here’s a recipe for a vegetable ragout that uses spinach and peas: sounds good. But the dish also calls for potatoes and they haven’t come in yet; let’s use turnips instead.
Oregano can take the place of tarragon, parsnips for carrots: how about some beets? The result: a Frankenstein’s monster of a dish that will then be served to long-suffering loved ones, who will eat every scrap of it and praise it no matter how bad it tastes, because it is home-grown.

Even worse than the recipe-victims are those gardener cooks who Invent. They seem to think that because they’ve successfully grown a few tomatoes and rutabagas, they’re automatically endowed with the knowledge of what to do with them; and if all else fails, some hot chili peppers will rescue the meal.

Herb-growing is responsible for some of the worst abuses. Since herbs—if they grow at all—produce copiously, the gourmet gardener applies them with a heavy hand: why use a pinch of thyme when entire bushes are to be had? Then there are those funny-tasting herbs (pineapple sage and cinnamon basil come to mind, cross-dressers of the herbary): so easy to grow and so hard to find a use for.

Why not throw a few leaves into the pot?

Herbs and vegetables are tossed merrily together—having made only the briefest visit to the sink beforehand—then stirred a few times and voila: garden goulash. “It doesn’t get much fresher than this,” crows the proud chef as she dishes it up.

The resulting meal is virtuously devoid of butter or olive oil or salt, or any store-bought condiment that might rescue it from dire awfulness, As the guests pick their way through raw chunks of broccoli and slimy overdone zucchini slices, they may encounter the occasional non-food particle: grit? grasshopper leg? it couldn’t be a slug, could it? “This is really, uh, fresh,” they mutter.

The truth is, the practice of gardening is inimical to good cooking. By the time the gardening day is over, the gardener is too tired to cook. Unable to market, one is forced to make do with whatever is lying about, even if it includes huge zucchinis, wooden beets ape over-the-hill potatoes.

The longer I garden, the more I find myself tempted into this sort of crime: to turn that huge crop of Swim chard into a casserole or a pasta sauce; to cook up a unique crearice that will, at one and the same time, empty the larder of all chat re dundant produce and earn me a place in the ranks of the gourmet gardeners.