We have a glut of courgettes in the Peace Garden. If you’ve ever grown courgettes you will know they all ripen on the same day. You wait all of June and July for courgettes, you crave them, but there are none.

August rolls around, then the beginning of September and one day—bam! You have more courgettes than you know what to do with. A humungous surfeit you could say. You start handing them out to your neighbours and friends at work because there’s no way a single person can eat all those courgettes.

After harvesting the usual bumper crop of courgettes this year, I took a dozen to the office. I piled them on a table and posted a sign advertising them as free.

The next day I noticed an addition to my sign “Free Courgettes,” underneath someone had written, “and Save the Whales.”

‘Courgettes are very versatile’, I say to people I am trying to give them to/offload them on to. ‘How’s about a cake?’ I ask. ‘Yuck’, they reply.

I put a big bag of courgettes in my car this week and left the windows open, hoping someone would take them. When I got back there were four bags.

This got me thinking of all the ways in which courgettes could be used.

Bam Bam could do with a new club, how about green piano legs, or perhaps I could hollow one out to make a canoe?

I am keen to try courgette spaghetti and will be grating some to freeze but what shall I do with the zillions I have left? Answers on a post card please.

In the meantime, here’s a very nice recipe for chocolate courgette cake. Honest – it is so tasty, you will love it. Yes, of course you can have some of my courgettes to make it. Help yourselves please!

http://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/633634/chocolate-courgette-cake