Zucchini Plants
A Beginner’s Guide to Growing Zucchini Plants
Zucchini plants are great starter plants if you are just beginning to get your eco-friendly garden going. There are lots of great reasons, of course, to start a vegetable garden.
Starter gardens are, first of all, great for the environment. If you’ve heard of the renowned UC Berkeley professor, Michael Pollen, you know that one of the things he advocates is growing your own vegetable garden so that you lower your carbon footprint.
Second, given the economic times, starter gardens can really save you a good chunk of change at the grocery store. You can have the healthy pleasure of fresh vegetables on your table for simply the cost of growing them. You could, in fact, sell them at your local farmer’s market if you get really into it—but this is getting ahead of ourselves.
Finally, starter gardens are their own reward. There is a great pleasure in growing things and in having beautifully flowering vegetables to look at daily from you kitchen window.
Why zucchini?
Zucchini plants are great for your starter garden because they are so easy to grow, don’t require a lot of complicated maintenance, grow quickly, and you can use them in a variety of dishes. All of these aspects make zucchini a great choice for anyone who wants to start their first vegetable garden.
Tips on how to grow zucchini plants in your garden:
Wait until the weather starts getting warm again. It is best to plant zucchini once you are sure winter is over and that the weather is going to stay relatively warm from here on out. For most of us in the Northern Hemisphere, this means early April.
Despite the Italian sounding name, zucchini came from the New World and so it is particularly well suited to our modern climates. If you’re curious, the reason zucchini have the name they do is because Italian immigrants reintroduced the zucchini to the New World when they migrated here in the 1920s. California’s mild climate has made it one of the leading producers of Zucchini in the world.
When planting zucchini you want to make mounds of fertile soil throughout your garden paced at least a couple of feet from each other.
Although you are only looking to get about two zucchini plants per mound, you will want to plant three or 4 seeds so that you can weed out the weaklings once they sprout.
Water your zucchini mounds daily. In addition, wait.
In about 10 to 15 days, you should see them sprout and within a month from planting it is time to remove the weaklings so they don’t drain the resources from the stronger plants and take them down with them.
Within two months from the time of first planting, your zucchini should be ripe and ready to be added to your favorite dishes.
See. It’s as easy as it gets!
This sounds too good to be true. Are there any complications that can happen?
There are, of course, a couple of things that can keep your zucchini plants from flowering into edible zucchinis. First, zucchini require pollination by bees, so if you are in the areas where pesticides have caused these pollinators to disappear, you may not get zucchini.
The second problem is that zucchini do have a couple of natural predators. The first is the striped cucumber beetle that despite its name doesn’t make a distinction between zucchini and cucumbers. When you see them on your plants, pick them off with your fingers. If they have infested a vine, it is best to dig it up and discard it.
Moths known as Vine Borers have names that are more accurate. They will weaken the vines and make your zucchini plants wan and sickly. You won’t be able to catch these little guys and if they are a real problem where you live, the only solution is insecticide.
A Worldwide Culinary Delight
As long as a swarm of moths or beetles doesn’t wipe out your garden, you should have fresh zucchini for the summer. In fact, you could try a plethora of world recipes that feature the zucchini from Mexican zucchini quesadilla, to ratatouille, to Greek cheese stuffed zucchini.
So plant your zucchini plants this spring and enjoy a summer of international cuisine. Yum!