Health & Fitness

Humor & Fun

Lifestyle & Travel

Personal Growth

Product Reviews

Home » Home & Garden

The Goods on Gardening by Clara

Submitted by Frank Moffatt on Sunday, 2 May 20104 Comments

ZUCCHINI
Hi Folks! I hope everyone is ready to tend to their gardens. I certainly am and that keeps me so busy these days.

Today our topic is Zucchini - a small summer squash that belongs to the species Cucurbita pepo. The Zucchini can be yellow, green, or light green and generally has a similar shape to a ridged cucumber, though a few cultivars are available that produce round or bottle-shaped fruit. On a culinary level Zucchini is treated as a vegetable. Botanically, however, the Zucchini is an immature fruit, being a swollen ovary of the female Zucchini flower. For more information about this fruit visit: www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zucchini.

I’ve been growing Zucchini in my garden for years because they are so easy to plant. But you must be extra careful when they begin to grow as they are a tasty favorite to slugs. What I do to curb the problem is that I surround the newly planted Zucchini with slices of cucumber placed in a thin aluminum container. What happens is that the cucumber reacts with the aluminum giving off a smell that insects and especially slugs don’t like.

Zucchini grows quickly and yields a lot of produce if it receives enough sun and the plants are spaced out enough to make room for the big green leaves.

When harvesting your Zucchini, plants that are five inches long are good for stir fries Zucchini Bread and or cake. They more you harvest the plant the more it produces once they started to begun to produce fruit.

When I lived in Italy I would mix my Zucchini with grated carrots and onions into my spaghetti sauce, so good!

Next time when we will talk about Tomatoes and I have a special secret to share with you on how to get them to produce a lot of fruit – so until then keep it growing and keep it green, be well and eat lots of vegetables!

Clara Simpson was born in a small farming community in the Philippines 63 years ago. She is an eternal optimist and believer that if it can be done she can do it. She has now offered her services to http://www.yoursecondfifty.com to help you enhance your gardening green thumb.

  • Share/Save/Bookmark

4 Comments »

  • Rita said:

    The first time I ate Zucchini I loved it - funny I have never liked cucumber. Thank you for this article Clara I think I will give it a shot and try to grow some this year.

    - 2 May 2010 at 9:42 am
  • Marg said:

    There is nothing like warm, buttered Zucchini loaf :-)

    - 5 May 2010 at 4:23 am
  • Sara said:

    I love Zucchini in stir-fry. What’s next Clara?

    - 9 June 2010 at 3:14 am
  • Yunia said:

    Hi Clara,

    Hope you doing well :-)

    Its been a while since the last article.

    What’s next? Looking forward for another tips from you.

    Thank You - GBU!

    - 20 June 2010 at 3:55 pm

Leave your response!

Add your comment below, or trackback from your own site. You can also subscribe to these comments via RSS.

Be nice. Keep it clean. Stay on topic. No spam.

You can use these tags:
<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>

This is a Gravatar-enabled weblog. To get your own globally-recognized-avatar, please register at Gravatar.