6 Useful Tips for Growing Zucchini Seedlings

Growing zucchini is popular because zucchini is one of the easiest plants to grow in your garden. Most gardeners can plant a few zucchini seedlings and watch the plants grow quickly without any problems.

I love zucchini. Aside from tomatoes, zucchini is the only vegetable that really heralds summer for me. I love a lot of zucchini recipes. So I want to make sure our harvest is abundant and that’s usually what happens. In fact, our harvest tends to be so abundant that I beg my parents, family, and friends to take their share, too.

Here are some tips we use to grow zucchini plants.

1) Plant at the right time

Zucchini plants are NOT frost friendly at all. If you plant your zucchini plants before the threat of frost passes, you risk your entire harvest.
Zucchini don’t even like cold temperatures, but I can’t blame them!
So this means that you must resist the temptation and not crash too soon. If fruits form in cold weather, they are unlikely to grow well.

2) Choose the right place

Once you have found the right time to plant your zucchini, you need to decide where to plant zucchini in your garden. The location you choose should receive full sun, so a garden bed that is shaded by a large tree is a BAD choice.

It should also be a moist, well-drained location. However, the site should not be soaked! Be sure to add compost and organic matter to the soil you have selected for growing zucchini plants.

3) Use succession planting

Many people don’t realize that growing zucchini seedlings is a good option for succession planting because they are not frost hardy. When we think of succession planting, we think of plants that grow from spring to fall, not summer-loving plants.

Zucchini plants break this mold. These plants grow quickly and you can usually harvest the first fruits 40-60 days after planting.

To avoid drowning in piles of zucchini (which really isn’t a bad thing if you LOVE zucchini), start new plants two or three times a season. This allows you to extend your harvest season. Zucchini plants tend to produce a lot of fruit at once and then slow down until they stop.

Best of all, you don’t need to start zucchini seedlings indoors. Simply plant these seeds in the ground.

4) Mounds of Zucchini Plants

Plant a mound of 2 to 3 zucchini plants together. This is important because zucchini has flowers that need to be pollinated to create the fruit you want. These flowers open for 1 day. Yes, only 1 day! If pollination fails, you don’t get zucchini, and that would be a shame. Planting several plants together improves the chances of pollination. Gardeners can choose to purchase seedlings or plant zucchini seeds directly into the garden.

5) Understand zucchini pollination

So now you know that flowers open for one day, but did you know that there are male and female flowers on a zucchini plant? Male and female flowers open at the same time, but only a female flower creates a fruit. Male flowers are only intended for pollination.

On most new plants, the male flowers tend to settle first, and then you get frustrated because your plant is full of flowers without any fruit forming. Don’t worry just yet, especially if you see pollinating insects fluttering around. The female flowers are on the way.

The female flowers have small fruits behind the base of the flower, making them easy to distinguish. If you are concerned about your crop, you can remove the male flowers and pollinate the female flowers yourself.

6) Mulch around your plants

Once the seedlings have emerged from the soil and become established, place mulch around the base of your plants. This helps keep weeds away and the mulch also helps the soil retain moisture. Mulch also helps regulate soil temperature.