Given your zucchini experience, you will likely be amused to hear that one year my mother planted about twenty zucchini plants. In Southern California. We, too, got one of those 101 Zucchini Recipes books, and I think we ate all of them. Repeatedly. That year scarred us all.

But, wow, gardening in northern Germany sounds DIFFERENT. Zucchini that don't have imperial ambitions! I had to google topinambur, though - apparently it's what we call Jerusalem artichoke, and you make spirits from it? I HAD NO IDEA.