Zucchini

Zucchini work reasonable well here, although I haven’t had anything like the bumper crops we had in Switzerland. Which is partly a good thing, because we can’t get quite as sick of them as we did there.

In my garden, the plants always grow big but many flowers stay unpollinated and fall off or the tiny fruit die off as soon as they form. If the fruits do grow big, they often do so asymmetrically, big on one end, small on the other.

Zucchini is probably one of those plants that really needs a regular supply of water and doesn’t do that well with my twice-weekly deep waterings.

This summer I tried a dark green variety one in the eastwards vegetable garden and a yellow one in the raised beds o the westwards side under a canopy. The green one developed very few fruit although one of those grew to dreaded baseball bat size, hidden under a sage shrub. The yellow one produced a lot of smallish to mid-sized, juicy fruit with excellent taste.

Both got the usual powdery mildew in the height of sommer but it was pretty manageable with milkwater. By late September they were both finished and had to be taken out.

I will try yellow zucchini again next summer. They taste better and they can’t hide…