I harvested our first zucchini today from our Fordhook (Burpee) plants. It’s a whopping 3 pounds (1.5 kilos), 10 inches long and 4 inches across at the biggest part!! I grated about 1/3 of it and made zucchini bread (which takes about 2 cups grated zucchini) and plan to use part of it tomorrow for rosemary zucchini pizza. And since you usually only use a small zucchini for the pizza, I may even get another batch of zucchini bread from this one zucchini!
Usually we pick our zucchini when they are much smaller but this plant is massive to begin with so the zucchini would have been completely underdeveloped and about half as long. The zucchini was almost doubling in size every day. I guess the plant is really loving all the rain and sunshine extremes we’ve been getting lately. This photo of the plants really don’t do them justice. The plant is probably about 4 feet across. There’s another little one hiding underneath. Guess I learned a little something about spacing zucchini plants this year! The cucumbers on the left are two we bought from Hagebau which survived the slug invasion. Now we just need to keep the baby slugs from feeding on the cucyumbers – which means it’s time for more corn meal traps. Just grab an old mayonaise jar, put a few spoonfulls of corn meal or flour into the jar, lay it on its side near your slug salad bar and let the little guys feast. The crawl in to eat it, feast, crawl out and die.
There’s also a couple sad little bell pepper plants and eggplants. It’s not really warm enough for them but the ones in the greenhouse are thriving. Now if we could just get the eggplants to pollinate. We’ve had lots of blooms but no fruit. We might have to try hand pollination. You just need to take a small, clean paintbrush and swirl it around inside the bloom. Humid and/or hot weather can inhibit pollination of eggplant blossoms and we’ve had both of those lately.
How is your garden doing?
Oh Tiffany that is one big zucchini!! Is it extremely seedy in the center? Think that would make about 5- 10 loaves of zuchhini bread!!
that is HUGE! I am so jealous lol I can’t even get one
@Janet – it does have more seeds than I usually see in a zucchini (the small ones) but still only about an inch or two thick through the middle. Would have been great for making zucchini boats filled with ground beef or other goodness. My husband apparently loved those as a kid…but none of our zucchini last year were big enough for them.
@Lisa – Are your plants growing? Is it a pollination problem or a lack of planting issue? 😉 We just put a few more seeds in the ground 2 weeks ago so we’ll have some later plants too. Cucumbers and zucchini can be planted once a month during the growing season to make sure you have peak producers growing when you need them.