Zucchini plants dwarf the herbs in our 4 X 6 raised bed garden.
On April 14th I blogged about our humble garden’s hopeful beginnings. I’m happy to report that we have now harvested three very healthy and very tasty zucchini’s from our plants. Below is the first one.
Our first home-grown zucchini.
I was alarmed that many of the young fruit seemed to turn yellow and fall off. So I turned to Google for the answer. Since the plants did not appear to have any disease, I determined that lack of pollination was likely the culprit. To solve this, I went out each morning when the flowers were open and plucked a male flower, peeled back the petals to expose the pollen. Then I brushed it against the female flowers and hoped for the best. Success! It worked.
It’s a bit tricky because there are fewer female flowers and they seem to open earlier in the morning than the male flowers do, but I’m getting the hang of it now.
A male zucchini flower is open, exposing the pollen.
A female zucchini flower (center) has just closed. The fruit is visible beneath it.
We have some powdery mildew on the leaves, but it’s not bad enough to cause problems yet. I’ve read that spraying the plants with one part milk to nine parts water will kill the mildew. I’ll be trying that soon, since we are having a week of rainy weather.
A mild case of powdery mildew shows up as white spots on the zucchini plant leaves.
Our zucchini plants only get half a day of sun, and they seem to want more, so next time I’ll put them in a different location. Ours is a mostly organic garden since we don’t use chemical fungicides or insecticides, but I will admit to adding a stimulus package of Miracle Grow when the plants started looking a bit yellow. We already had our first zucchini on the way and it was too big to fail.
