Two courgette plants are plenty, as long as you keep picking

Courgettes, or zucchini, are one of the easiest and most generous crops you can grow. Sow them after the danger of frost, give them rich soil and plenty of water, and pick often. Two plants are enough for most households, and three or four will bury you in courgettes.

The one rule that matters is picking. Pick them small, every couple of days, and the plant keeps making more. Leave one to grow into a marrow and the plant slows right down.

Sowing

Courgettes grow fast, so there’s no point starting them early.

• Indoors: about three to four weeks before your last spring frost. Sow one seed per 8 cm (3 in) pot, 2.5 cm (1 in) deep, on its edge. Keep them warm, around 20 °C (68 °F), and they’ll be up in a week.
• Outdoors: from about two weeks after your last frost, once the soil is warm. Sow two seeds at each spot and keep the stronger one. A cloche or a cut-off plastic bottle over them helps.

Planting out

Plant out from about two weeks after your last frost, after a week of hardening off.

1. Choose a sunny, sheltered spot.
2. Dig a hole and fill it with compost or well-rotted manure. Courgettes are hungry plants.
3. Plant on a slight mound, with a moat around it for watering, so water goes to the roots rather than sitting around the stem.
4. Space plants about 90 cm (3 ft) apart. In square foot gardening, give each plant four squares.

Nasturtiums, sweetcorn and French marigolds make good neighbours. Keep courgettes away from potatoes.

Watering and feeding

Water deeply at the base, a full can per plant twice a week in dry weather, and more in a heatwave. Avoid wetting the leaves, which encourages mildew. Once the first fruits form, feed every week or two with a high-potash liquid feed such as tomato food.

Flowers and pollination

Each plant has male flowers, on thin stalks, and female flowers, with a tiny courgette behind them. Bees carry pollen from one to the other. Early in the season, a plant often makes only male flowers for a week or two, which is normal.

If young courgettes shrivel and rot from the tip, they weren’t pollinated. On a dry morning, pick a male flower, peel back its petals and dab its centre into each open female flower.

Picking

Courgettes start cropping about 50 to 65 days from sowing, or 35 to 50 days after planting out. Pick them at 10 to 15 cm (4 to 6 in) long, cutting the stalk with a knife. In midsummer, check every day or two. A healthy plant crops for about twelve weeks, until the first autumn frost.

The flowers are edible too. Pick male flowers for stuffing and frying, and leave a few for pollination.

Common problems

Powdery mildew. White patches on leaves from midsummer. Water at the base, remove the worst leaves and keep picking.

Slugs. They take young plants overnight. Protect plants until they’re big and tough.

Fruit rotting at the tip. Poor pollination. Hand-pollinate, or wait for more bees.

Squash vine borer in the US. Plants suddenly wilt with sawdust at the base. See zucchini in zone 6.

For UK timings, see when to sow courgettes. Set your own frost dates on the courgette page.