My 2024 zucchini adventure – Reddit Post

Okay maybe adventure is a strong word for it but I wanted to share the story of my silly zucchini plant this year.

For background, we’ve grown squash and zucchini in ground and in pots in the past and always dealt with their demise by pests some time in mid-summer, usually due to squash vine borer. So we feel a little discouraged about them but I thought I’d still try to just grow one zucchini plant this year that I could watch closely and really try to pick off any bug eggs I saw to prevent pests and try to get a decent zucchini crop.

So I planted my one plant in the corner of our main raised bed. This turned out to be an interesting choice. I put it in the raised bed because I wanted it to have a good shot at getting proper water/drainage/nutrients compared to the rest of our garden which is mostly in pots. I put it in the corner because I knew it would probably make a large plant and I didn’t want it to crowd out the rest of what we had in the raised bed. I started noticing vine borer eggs on it some time in June and since it was only one plant, I had the time time to inspect it and start picking them off. Around this time, it also started getting big enough that it was leaning over the side of the bed. I thought it would stay lower to the ground and bushy like a squash plant but I guess I didn’t know that zucchini plants can be more of a vine.

At this point, what I COULD HAVE done is try to grow it vertically up some kind of support. I didn’t have the patience for this though so I just tied it to a bamboo pole to relieve some of the strain of bending over. I was also getting paranoid about squash vine borer, and suspected some of the holes in the stem might be a bore hole. I saw that you could do a surgery on the zucchini stem to cut it open and pull them out, so I tried this a couple of times. I never found any though, so the holes may have just been from the stress on the stem bending over. Did this make me support the plant differently? No.

So now in late June/early July my zucchini plant is luckily bug-free, surgerized, and leaning over but starting to make me some zucchini. I figured well it will be fun to get 2 or 3 zucchini out of this plant and then, as usual, it will die soon after. I decided my work was done and from there on out left the plant alone except to water it. It wasn’t in the sunniest spot and didn’t seem to get good pollination on most of its flowers, so we got a zucchini maybe once every 2 weeks or so. Actually, this was a great rate at which to harvest them since we don’t even eat that much zucchini. 😆

At some point in August we decide to take pictures with this huge, beautiful zucchini plant that has surprisingly made us a decent amount of food, and we notice that the pole really isn’t supporting it anymore and it seems to be just resting on the ground. The stem looks really mangled which I figured was from the stress of bending over and its previous medical care. We laugh it off and are pleased that it found something to sit on. Another month goes by, we get a few more zucchinis, and eventually in September it starts getting powdery mildew. Figuring this is its inevitable end, we leave it be. A few more zucchini later and finally in early October it seems to have slowed down enough that we think the powdery mildew and the changing season means we really won’t get any more zucchini. Time to pull it out.

I reach for the mangled, dry stem, pull, and it comes up immediately in my hand. No resistance at all. It was just resting on the raised bed. My first thought is wow did it really have that little contact with the soil? Don’t zucchinis need a decent amount of water? It hadn’t shown much wilting at all which cucurbits definitely tend to do on hot and sunny summer days. So I start looking down the rest of the stem and pulling. Eventually I get to the ground and reach resistance. I have to tug HARD and part of the stem comes up. I find another spot and tug again and some more comes up with a decent root system. Despite all of my betting against this poor plant, it has survived not only squash vine borer, but being bent out of whack on the side of the raised bed, and therefore decided it would give up on its parents and reach down to Mother Earth for help instead.

So that’s the story of how my fairly productive zucchini plant went from starting in a raised bed to growing legs and crawling out to become an in-ground plant. I think this means we weren’t even watering it and it was just surviving on what nature gave it. After writing this out, I think I am much more amused by this than any of you may be, but maybe there are some other weirdos out there who can relate. Please enjoy the pictures and note that yes, picture 2 is of the stem in August before we realized that part of the stem was fully dead.