Raising Squash Crops: Zucchini Growing Tips
Reading Time: 3 minutes
Learn zucchini growing tips and raise successful garden squash crops.
by Karin Deneke
Raising squash crops in your garden is relatively easy. You can harvest more than you can handle when it comes to quickly developing zucchini, just one of the squash family members. You can pick a 6-to-8-inch zucchini in less than a week following pollination of the female flowers. That’s the size I prefer to harvest because the larger the fruit, the tougher the skin becomes, and the bigger and harder the seeds inside.
Did I say fruit? Yes, crops from squash plants aren’t technically vegetables but are correctly referred to as fruit. Take the zucchini, for instance; each plant produces separate large male and female 3-to 6-inch wide bell-shaped flowers. The pollen from the male flowers is transferred to the female flowers — mostly by insects. If you check underneath the large foliage of your plants, you’ll discover many long-stemmed male flowers. Female flowers are much fewer, and instead of a hollow, long stem, they’re attached to a short, bulbous growth. Once pollination occurs, this growth has the potential to develop into a zucchini.
Most zucchini plants begin flowering within 45 to 55 days after germination. At first, you’ll discover a profusion of large yellow blossoms on long stems. It takes a few weeks before female flowers begin to show up. There’s no harm done if you pick a few of these yellow beauties to eat or display on your table. There are plenty!
Once my zucchini plants have bloomed for at least a week, I have the habit of checking underneath the foliage almost daily in anticipation of discovering the first female flower, which hopefully will develop into my first zucchini of the season.
Once the first zucchini appears, it seems like a never-ending harvest follows. However, it barely lasts a few months, during which my garden produces other summer squash varieties as well.
All squash-related plants belong to the cucurbit family, a Latin catchall for gourds. This includes such well-known species as cucumbers, watermelons, zucchini, butternut squash, and pumpkins — all vining plants that produce fruit and have separate male and female flowers. These varieties provide us with summer and winter squash crops. The latter, such as butternut squash and pumpkins, keep well and are easily stored for winter use.
Space-Saving Methods
Should your garden space be limited, unable to accommodate these ground-hugging, quickly spreading squash varieties, you have the option of training these vines on a trellis, t-posts, or planting them in large containers. It may take a little work and time to attach and train your vines. When siting your plants, allow an area with full sun exposure, or at least 6 to 8 hours of sunshine.
Container Planting
I had an old cow watering tank filled with garden soil and beefed up with cow manure. I planted it with seedlings I raised in my kitchen window but placed it too close to a wooded area of my lot to keep the planter out of the path of the riding mower. That was around the middle of May. Two months later, as the canopy of my deciduous trees above had severely restricted the sunlight reaching the container garden, I had a jungle of plants leaning toward the light, forcing me to buy 6-foot bamboo stakes to stabilize light-starved plants. These plants barely received five hours of sunlight. The zucchini seemed to be the least phased by the lack of sunlight, producing one fruit after another, as they were located the closest to the sunlight.
My cucumber plants suffered the most. Shade from the trees above and the large leaves of the zucchini plants prevented fruiting. I recommend as much light as possible for your cucumbers and adding fertilizer (10-10-10) a couple of times during the growing season. Also, keeping your squash crops well-watered is a must.
Companion Planting for Containers
Companion planting works well for containers. Mix vining members of the squash family with taller, non-squash family plants such as corn.
Make these delicious and easy zucchini recipes from the author: Easy & Simple Zucchini Recipes.
Karin Deneke recently relocated to rural Ohio from the mountains of Colorado. Her articles deal with a variety of subjects, from production agriculture to gardening to soil science, just to name a few.
Originally published in the July/August 2024 issue of Countryside and Small Stock Journal and regularly vetted for accuracy.
