Country people joke that we keep our cars locked in the summer so someone won’t put a bag of zucchini in the front seat.  Zucchini is easy to grow and produces large amounts of vegetables, so you only need a few plants to feed your family.  Even then, you will have a lot of zucchini to use up.

Type of Cucurbit

Zucchini is officially a summer squash.  It will interbreed with pumpkins and cucumbers, as well as cantaloupe.  That means you have to separate it from these other plants to keep it from cross-pollinating.

Spacing

In addition to cross-pollinating with other cucurbits, zucchini plants spread out and take up a lot of room.  Fortunately, you only need one or two in order to have all the zucchini you want.  Zucchini is planted in mounds.  These mounds should be about three feet from each other or anything else.  You plant three or four seeds in each mound.

Thinning the Plants

When the zucchini plants come up, you wait a couple of days and then pinch off all but one plant per mound.  Pinching off is just what it sounds like — you pinch the stem and sever it, so the plant comes off in your hand.  If you yank the little plants out of the ground, you disturb the root system of the plant you want to keep.  Pinching off does not disturb the plants around the one being pinched.

Pollination

People often complain that their squash are producing flowers but no fruit.  Male flowers are produced before female flowers.  The male flowers provide the pollen for the female flowers, then die with no fruit.  If you do not have squash bees, you will have to hand pollinate your zucchini.  Female flowers have a baby zucchini at their base.  Male flowers do not.  Take a male flower and carefully peel back the petals.  Gently brush the male parts against the inside of the female flower.  One male flower can pollinate about five female flowers.

Fertilization

You need to put a balanced fertilizer around the squash when they bloom.  Take care to follow the directions and put no more than they say, as too much fertilizer will cause the plants to grow to huge proportions without producing much fruit.  All the plant’s energy goes into producing the foliage and you get no squash.

Watering

Zucchini need an average amount of water for a vegetable.  Vegetables need water several times a week to produce their vegetable.  The soil needs to be moist but not squishy.

Harvesting

Zucchini should be harvested when it is 5 inches long.  It becomes tough and fibrous when it gets much larger. 

Uses

Zucchini goes into bread, casseroles, and can be eaten by itself.  It must be cooked to freeze or can.  It does not keep very long raw, however.

Want to learn to garden? My first attempt at gardening ended up in failure. The weeds took over and squeezed the vegetables out. I was very frustrated by this waste of good seed, time, and money. So I became a master gardener and spent a lot of time helping other people avoid or overcome problems in their garden. 

In order to help others garden successfully, I have written a book, Vegetable Gardening from the Ground Up, available in an ebook or a paperback from Amazon. It is also in Kindle Unlimited.