I think the zucchini is dying.

[fluffy_goddess]

I convinced my Mom to put a zucchini plant in the garden this year, and it's been... interesting.  It took a while to get going (the first half dozen zucchini got about 3-4 inches long and as thick around as my finger, then fell off and died), but it's produced three or four good-sized zucchini, and one that we picked because it was getting bigger

Comments

[heinleinfan]

If you see no signs of it being bugs, do the leaves get a "dusty" looking kind of white stuff on them before going yellow? Here in CoSprings *all* the cucurbits we have suffer from Powdery Mildew. (It's not actually mildew, it's an airborne fungus). The leaves will look kind of white for a while, usually starting in the center of the leaves, and then spreading out to cover most of the leaf surface, but still healthy and producing, then before you can blink the plant will be dead. It's virtually impossible to get rid of the spores (especially since we garden in a community garden) and so we just expect our cucurbits will die off at the end of each season, long before the cold would actually kill them, so we try to get as much production out of them before then as we can.
About the only way to treat it is chemically with fungicides which we don't like to do; my husband and I found an organic fungicide called Actinivate which gives them a little longer life span, and a bit more production because it holds off the mildew a bit, but doesn't completely wipe it out like a stronger fungicide would.

As for the early dying zucchini, that would be from non-pollination. Cucurbits are exclusively insect pollinated, so sometimes early fruits will not produce because there just isn't enough insect activity early enough in the season for the female flowers to get pollinated by the male flowers' pollen. You can help combat this by planting early-blooming spring flowers in and around the garden, to tell all the pollinators "Hey, we have flowers here!" so they'll know your garden is a place to stop by. Or you could actually manually pollinate in the early spring as well, if you just really wanted some early zucchini.