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Get a load of that squash Gold Hill couple had to harvest it to avoid traffic snarls By MARK FREEMAN GOLD HILL - Pearl and Ed Kruusi tried hard to stay as cool as cucumbers all summer about the strange-looking cucuzzi that hung long and saggy along their garden fence. But when the big squash started stopping traffic on Rogue River Highway, it was time to take the shears to their 3-foot-long vegetable before the garden rubberneckers caused a car crash that might squish their squash. "We had cars stopping and people asking me about my long, weird squash growing on the fence," says Pearl Kruusi, 68. "And when I had a garage sale, everybody stopped to look at my squash instead of my sale." But the Kruusis believe that's their penance for growing a long, lean cucuzzi that, well, raises some eyebrows. "We've had weird-looking carrots before, but nothing like this," she says. "This looks awfully obscene." Yet it's just garden-variety weirdness in the Rogue Valley, where produce propagators take great delight in watching their once normal-looking vegetables take on strange shapes and sizes under the August sun. Be it a tomato that looks like Bill Clinton or a carrot that looks like the Planters' peanut man, green-thumbers seem uniquely fascinated with the funny-looking stuff they can grow. "They call us about this sort of stuff all the time," says Pam Rouhier, who has seen about all the funky vegetables she can stomach during 20 years tilling veggie advice at the Grange Co-op in Medford. "People are fascinated about what's different." Tomatoes are some of the most common, in part because a disease called catfacing can pucker a tomato into Granny Dollar. Carrots are common as well, sometimes growing extra appendages when trying to expand in the valley's rock-hard soils. "Years ago, I saw a crookneck squash that I swear to you looked like a horse's head," Rouhier says. "It had ears and everything." Kruusi's cucuzzi, though, is just plain big. The couple grew a heap of cucuzzi vines from a single pack of 99-cent seeds. With the help of drip irrigation, the vines engulfed their patch like angry animals and pushed all their minerals into one vegetable. Most cucuzzis are snipped at 12 inches, but the Kruusi version stretched to 35 inches before Pearl, in her wisdom, chopped the boomerang-like squash Thursday before anyone got hurt out there along Rogue River Highway. Now, it begs the question - what do two retirees do with a skinny, 35-inch squash? "We'll eat some of it like a cucumber, and fry some of it up like a squash," she says. "But knowing Ed, it won't take but a couple meals." Reach reporter Mark Freeman at 776-4473, or e-mail [email protected] Mail Tribune Home | Ottaway Newspapers, Inc. | Dow Jones & Co., Inc. | Privacy | Contact Us Copyright � 2001 Mail Tribune, Inc.