Zucchini plant varieties fall into two categories. Some are vining and require room for sprawl or the addition of trellis varieties. There are also bush types which are more suitable for small space gardening and planters. Zucchini needs about six to eight hours of full sun and consistently moist, fertilized soil. Here are five tips to help you get a more reliable harvest throughout the growing season from your zucchini plants. The reason this is important when growing zucchini is because its flowers need to be pollinated to form a viable fruit, and each female flower is only open for one day. No pollination means no zucchini. So, if you have multiple plants growing near each other, your chance of pollination greatly improves. New zucchini plants tend to produce a lot of male flowers at first. This can be frustrating for gardeners when they see a lot of flowers blooming but no fruits forming. Be patient. Once the plants mature a little, they will start setting flowers of both sexes. And thanks to the early male flowers, there already should be plenty of pollinating insects in the area. You will know you have female flowers when you see tiny fruits directly behind the base of the flower. If you’re really dedicated to your zucchini harvest, you can always take pollinating matters into your own hands. You can remove the male flowers and dust their pollen onto the female flowers to help ensure good pollination takes place. You can also use an artist’s paintbrush to transfer pollen from the male flower on the the female bloom. Moreover, don’t waste those early male flowers. You can still pick them, dip them in batter, and fry them up for a great treat. If you do plant a little too early, use row covers or mulch to protect your plants at night if the temperature dips below 60 degrees. Plus, keep these row covers handy in the fall to extend your harvest. Some gardeners feel the initial glut of zucchini is more than enough. But if you like a steady supply, succession planting is the way to go. Depending on your climate, you should be able to start new zucchini plants two to three times throughout the growing season to have a consistent harvest. Luckily, zucchini is extremely easy to grow from seed, and there’s no need to start seed indoors. You can directly sow seed in your garden once your first round of zucchini plants have matured and expect to see germination within days. Many gardeners do this second planting in mid-July or mid-August (or both). Plantings later in the season typically grow even faster than a spring planting. Adult squash vine borers look similar to wasps, but they’re actually moths. Unlike most moths, though, these fly during daylight hours and lay eggs at the base of susceptible plants. To avoid squash vine borers you could outsmart them by not planting your zucchini until mid-July. If there are no zucchini plants in your garden, there is no reason for the vine borer moth to stop by and lay her eggs. Plus, if you do have squash vine borers in your soil, delaying planting for one year can break the cycle of them infesting your plants. The larvae will wake up and not have anywhere to feed, rather than feeding on your plants and eventually reproducing themselves. You can also add row covers to prevent the adults from laying eggs on the zucchini, but you’ll need to hand-pollinate the flowers. But if you really want early zucchini, there is another way to foil this pest, which requires using foil. You can wrap the base of each stem with a small piece of aluminum foil. You only need to cover about 2 to 4 inches of the stem where it comes out of the ground. If you wrap the foil securely, the larvae shouldn’t be able to bore through it.
