Container Zucchini-ing
This is the first in a series of posts that I’m planning to write, outlining some of the things I learned during my balcony gardening last summer. Since there was a question over at
apartmentgarden about how I managed to grow zucchini in containers, I thought this topic was a good one to start with.
I’m going to begin by saying that the way I did it is by no means the only way, or even the correct way. I did some reading last year and used what I learned. I only ran into a few minor problems that I managed to figure out as I went along.
It all begins with a large compressed peat pot, approximately 2.5 feet in diameter and 2 feet deep, prepared with soilless potting medium. I bought a bagged mixture of soilless medium but you can make your own with a combination of peat, perlite, vermiculite, etc. Here’s a useful article about soilless mixes. In the near future, I’ll also be making another post about my preferred method of preparing pots for vegetables and houseplants alike.
Once the pot was filled with moistened medium, I simply planted my zucchini seedling into it. I tried starting them from seeds indoors but after some fungus problems, I gave up and bought seedlings (there’ll be a post about my experiences with that sometime in the future as well).
My little zucchini seedling grew faster and larger than I was ever expecting. This is them on May 31, when I first planted the seedling:
Two and a half weeks later, on June 16:
And my first zucchini, on June 27, and boy was it tasty!
How’d I have such a success with zucchini in containers? I’m afraid I don’t know exactly what I did right.
Things I did do that may have contributed to my success:
1. I have a southern exposure balcony that gets lots of fabulous light.
2. I mixed in some castings from my worm bin about two or three weeks after planting my seedling.
3. I made sure that my zucchini was well watered. I’d give it about a litre of water three times (total of three litres) over the course of a couple of hours. I always watered in the evening after I came home from work and was careful not to get water on the leaves or flowers. On particularly hot and dry days, I’d give them more than three litres. If it rained that day, I usually wouldn’t water them at all. Since the pot I was using was quite large and deep, overwatering wasn’t too much of a problem.
4. I hand-pollinated my zucchini in the morning. This one might have been the biggest factor in my success, and since it’s a little more complicated than “had good light”, “used worm castings”, and “watered regularly”, I’ll explain a little further.
One of the first things I read about growing zucchini in containers was that since you don’t usually grow too many of them at a time, attracting pollinating insects can be a problem. As such, many of the sites I read recommended hand-pollination.
In describing how to hand-pollinate zucchini, the sites made me quite nervous. They talked about male flowers and female flowers and I didn’t find any with pictures to help me distinguish between the two types of flowers. They only said that the female flowers would have a “thicker stem” than the male flowers. I was quite nervous, of course, and not sure I’d get any zucchini at all. But being an experimenter at heart, I was determined to at least try.
Then my first flower buds started to form on my zucchini. Thankfully, the difference between male and female flowers was immediately obvious. The female flowers didn’t have “thicker stems”. They had teeny tiny zucchini as their stems! The male flowers had long and slender stems that just looked like stems. They tended to be much taller and more numerous than the female flowers. In fact, I often had male flowers blooming while I had no female flowers to pollinate, but I never had a female flower to pollinate and no male flower available to undertake the job. Typical, I suppose ;)
Anyway, I found that the flowers didn’t bloom for very long. In fact, they usually wouldn’t survive the day. Eager to try hand-pollination, when my first female blossom opened, I snipped off a male flower with scissors and carefully removed the male blossom’s petals. This left me with a pollen-covered stamen on the end of the long stem.
At that point, the only thing I had to do was transfer pollen from the male flower to the stigma of the female flower. The stigma is the part that sticks up in the middle.
I made sure to transfer as much pollen as possible to ensure successful zucchini production. It was really quite easy and only took a few minutes.
The one time I had an unsuccessful zucchini was when I didn’t pollinate the female flower the first morning it opened. It became a morning ritual for me. Before I went to work, I’d bring the scissors outside, check if any of the opened blossoms were female, and if there were, give ‘em a good pollinating.
I ended up with a load of the tastiest zucchini I’ve ever had. I cut them from the plant when they were nice and slender and a deep green colour, as in the picture above.
Now, I unfortunately had a serious injury in July that dramatically affected my ability to continue to care for my balcony garden. I had some help in the watering department but without my careful supervision, my plants ended up having a not-so-great time. To be fair, I wasn’t having that great a time either, but that’s a whole other story.
Anyway, I’m not sure if it was because my guest-star-waterer wasn’t as patient as I was and just dumped the whole amount of water on my zucchini at the same time instead of applying it over the course of a couple of hours, but I ended up with a pretty serious earwig problem in that pot.
Ew. Seriously.
The plant first stopped producing flowers, then one by one the leaves turned brown and dropped off. I was quite disappointed, but I had other things on my mind such as figuring out how to get up and down stairs on crutches.
I’ve read about methods of dealing with earwigs, including leaving a wet roll of newspaper on the soil overnight to collect them (then dispose of them elsewhere), but because of my injury, I didn’t get a chance to try it.
So that’s a really long summary of my experience. I don’t know if it’ll be useful to anyone else, but it’s useful to me. Despite how it ended, I ultimately decided it was worth trying again. While I had one pot of zucchini on my balcony last year, I’m planning to have two this year.
apartmentgarden about how I managed to grow zucchini in containers, I thought this topic was a good one to start with.
I’m going to begin by saying that the way I did it is by no means the only way, or even the correct way. I did some reading last year and used what I learned. I only ran into a few minor problems that I managed to figure out as I went along.
It all begins with a large compressed peat pot, approximately 2.5 feet in diameter and 2 feet deep, prepared with soilless potting medium. I bought a bagged mixture of soilless medium but you can make your own with a combination of peat, perlite, vermiculite, etc. Here’s a useful article about soilless mixes. In the near future, I’ll also be making another post about my preferred method of preparing pots for vegetables and houseplants alike.
Once the pot was filled with moistened medium, I simply planted my zucchini seedling into it. I tried starting them from seeds indoors but after some fungus problems, I gave up and bought seedlings (there’ll be a post about my experiences with that sometime in the future as well).
My little zucchini seedling grew faster and larger than I was ever expecting. This is them on May 31, when I first planted the seedling:
Two and a half weeks later, on June 16:
And my first zucchini, on June 27, and boy was it tasty!
How’d I have such a success with zucchini in containers? I’m afraid I don’t know exactly what I did right.
Things I did do that may have contributed to my success:
1. I have a southern exposure balcony that gets lots of fabulous light.
2. I mixed in some castings from my worm bin about two or three weeks after planting my seedling.
3. I made sure that my zucchini was well watered. I’d give it about a litre of water three times (total of three litres) over the course of a couple of hours. I always watered in the evening after I came home from work and was careful not to get water on the leaves or flowers. On particularly hot and dry days, I’d give them more than three litres. If it rained that day, I usually wouldn’t water them at all. Since the pot I was using was quite large and deep, overwatering wasn’t too much of a problem.
4. I hand-pollinated my zucchini in the morning. This one might have been the biggest factor in my success, and since it’s a little more complicated than “had good light”, “used worm castings”, and “watered regularly”, I’ll explain a little further.
One of the first things I read about growing zucchini in containers was that since you don’t usually grow too many of them at a time, attracting pollinating insects can be a problem. As such, many of the sites I read recommended hand-pollination.
In describing how to hand-pollinate zucchini, the sites made me quite nervous. They talked about male flowers and female flowers and I didn’t find any with pictures to help me distinguish between the two types of flowers. They only said that the female flowers would have a “thicker stem” than the male flowers. I was quite nervous, of course, and not sure I’d get any zucchini at all. But being an experimenter at heart, I was determined to at least try.
Then my first flower buds started to form on my zucchini. Thankfully, the difference between male and female flowers was immediately obvious. The female flowers didn’t have “thicker stems”. They had teeny tiny zucchini as their stems! The male flowers had long and slender stems that just looked like stems. They tended to be much taller and more numerous than the female flowers. In fact, I often had male flowers blooming while I had no female flowers to pollinate, but I never had a female flower to pollinate and no male flower available to undertake the job. Typical, I suppose ;)
Anyway, I found that the flowers didn’t bloom for very long. In fact, they usually wouldn’t survive the day. Eager to try hand-pollination, when my first female blossom opened, I snipped off a male flower with scissors and carefully removed the male blossom’s petals. This left me with a pollen-covered stamen on the end of the long stem.
At that point, the only thing I had to do was transfer pollen from the male flower to the stigma of the female flower. The stigma is the part that sticks up in the middle.
I made sure to transfer as much pollen as possible to ensure successful zucchini production. It was really quite easy and only took a few minutes.
The one time I had an unsuccessful zucchini was when I didn’t pollinate the female flower the first morning it opened. It became a morning ritual for me. Before I went to work, I’d bring the scissors outside, check if any of the opened blossoms were female, and if there were, give ‘em a good pollinating.
I ended up with a load of the tastiest zucchini I’ve ever had. I cut them from the plant when they were nice and slender and a deep green colour, as in the picture above.
Now, I unfortunately had a serious injury in July that dramatically affected my ability to continue to care for my balcony garden. I had some help in the watering department but without my careful supervision, my plants ended up having a not-so-great time. To be fair, I wasn’t having that great a time either, but that’s a whole other story.
Anyway, I’m not sure if it was because my guest-star-waterer wasn’t as patient as I was and just dumped the whole amount of water on my zucchini at the same time instead of applying it over the course of a couple of hours, but I ended up with a pretty serious earwig problem in that pot.
Ew. Seriously.
The plant first stopped producing flowers, then one by one the leaves turned brown and dropped off. I was quite disappointed, but I had other things on my mind such as figuring out how to get up and down stairs on crutches.
I’ve read about methods of dealing with earwigs, including leaving a wet roll of newspaper on the soil overnight to collect them (then dispose of them elsewhere), but because of my injury, I didn’t get a chance to try it.
So that’s a really long summary of my experience. I don’t know if it’ll be useful to anyone else, but it’s useful to me. Despite how it ended, I ultimately decided it was worth trying again. While I had one pot of zucchini on my balcony last year, I’m planning to have two this year.