Courgettes and marrows are easy to grow, good to eat and offer plentiful crops
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| Courgette seedlings in a greenhouse
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'It's not surprising that such an exotic-looking plant, which originated in the southern US, hates the cold.'
There's no vegetable more fun to grow than a courgette or marrow. These plants are ideal for a junior garden: they grow well in the open and are decorative enough to mix into a flower border, while trailing varieties can be grown up a fence.
Courgettes and marrows also do well in big containers – one bush plant will fill a large tub. When first planted, they can be surrounded with a few loose-leaf lettuce plants or some radish seed for a quick catch crop before the monster fully develops.
Courgettes are baby marrows
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| Marrow 'Bush Baby' from Thompson & Morgan
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There's much confusion over the right names for members of the marrow family and newcomers to vegetable growing are sometimes amazed to discover that what they thought were courgettes have turned into marrows almost overnight. That's because courgettes (a French
name) or zucchini (Italian) are baby marrows. If you want to use them as courgettes, they must be harvested every two to three days while still small, which encourages more to keep on coming through the season.
Some varieties are better than others as larger fruits, known as marrows. 'Tiger Cross' is one of the best. Listed with them are often funny-shaped little fruits known as summer squashes. The winter squashes, which are good to cut when ripe and store, are usually grouped together with pumpkins.
Courgettes have really become popular in the last 50 years, and are now much more widely grown and eaten than marrows, although I think a marrow that is allowed to grow to at least 25-30cm (10-12in) long has a far better flavour and is an enjoyable vegetable.
Keep on feeding
You can't feed a marrow plant too generously. I've seen trailing varieties romping away on an old farmyard manure pile. I knew one gardener who dug out a hole about 60cm (2ft) deep and across for each plant, half filled it with lawn mowings, and topped it with a thick layer of manure and then topsoil. He said that as the grass rotted down and gave off warmth this created a hot bed – a method much used in Mrs Beeton's day to produce out-of-season crops in large gardens. The old chap watered the plants copiously and grew fantastic crops of marrows.
Without going to those extremes, be generous with bulky organic material when preparing a site for marrows and courgettes. If you are in an area with riding stables, look out for bags of rotted manure on sale or for free at their gateways. It may also be worth taking a bucket and spade to collect piles of horse droppings from country roads. Fresh manure mixed with bedding will need rotting down for at least a year before use.
Frost tender
It's not surprising that such an exotic-looking plant, which originated in the southern US, hates the cold. The plants will be killed quickly by frost if started too early or still growing when autumn cold comes.
I never sow any seed until mid-April and any plants put outside before the end of May are covered with glass or polythene and fleece at night, as well as on colder days until the risk of frost has passed. In some years, there is no May frost but cold nights can come unexpectedly: I once saw a large bed of courgette plants that were growing wonderfully well one week and were completely dead by the next.
Sowing and planting
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| Easy to grow from seed
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You can buy courgette and marrow plants ready to go direct into the garden, but they are easy and great fun to raise from seed. I never sow direct into the open ground as this is asking for trouble – the emerging seed leaves will attract slugs and snails from all over the neighbourhood for a tasty meal.
You can sow individual seeds in 7.5cm (3in) pots filled with potting compost, but I prefer to sow four to six seeds in one 5cm (2in) pot filled with moist vermiculite and stand this in the heated windowsill propagator or on the greenhouse bench in warmer weather. They will germinate and be ready to transfer to individual pots in four to five days to be grown on to transplant to a cold frame or polytunnel border by late April/early May.
Planted in to the open garden later in May, they can be protected at night in the first couple of weeks with cloches, or mini 'bell cloches' made from the bottoms of large plastic drinks bottles. Delay planting out until the plants have one or two pairs of true leaves, which have a rougher texture and are not so vulnerable to slugs and snails. To avoid attack, surround each young plant with a ring of coarse grit or other material the pests won't like travelling over.
Courgettes should be ready for harvesting when the fruits reach a size of about 10cm (4in) long. Cut each one with a sharp knife. To avoid a glut and extend the season, I start off more plants in early June.
The flowers
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| Web editor Sarah B's round courgette: De Nice A Fruit Rond
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Each plant produces male and female flowers, the latter easily identified by the tiny fruit at its back, and bees or other pollinating insects are usually needed to fertilise the blooms. However, plant breeders have developed some parthenocarpic varieties that are self-fertile and will produce fruits without insect assistance. They are particularly useful for early or late cropping or for growing in a greenhouse or polytunnel, where the insect population may well be reduced. Look for dark-green 'Parthenon', a compact-growing F1 hybrid that's good for small gardens, and pale-green 'Cavili'.
While male flowers are not needed for fruit production, they look pretty and are good to eat – dip each bloom in batter and fry, or use them raw to decorate a salad.
Prickly to handle
You may have noticed prickly little spines on the backs of leaves and stems of many varieties of courgettes and marrows. These can be an irritation when handling plants or harvesting fruit. On commercial farms, workers can suffer from allergic rashes and so plant breeders set out to eradicate or greatly reduce the number of spines. The new varieties 'Endurance' and 'Tristan' are good examples of this type, but under stress conditions, spines become more prominent.
Plant breeders have also succeeded in producing varieties with good resistance to virus and are working hard on resistance to powdery mildew, which was once a late-summer problem. However, as British weather becomes more unpredictable it seems that conditions favourable to the fungus can occur earlier in the season. 'Tosca' has reasonable resistance and better ones are on the way.
To make more efficient use of space, you can choose a climbing variety, such as 'Black Hawk' or 'Black Forest', and grow against a wall or fence. However, for these you will need to provide growing supports and tie in shoots and fruit as required. The fruits are best cut as courgettes, because if allowed to grow to marrow size, you will need a tie below each fruit to prevent it pulling the plant down towards the ground and becoming an old-style trailer. To save space, choose one of the compact bush varieties of a reduced foliage-type developed for machine harvest. These can be a real benefit for home gardeners lacking garden space and some of the new varieties are also good for container growing ('Venus' is an example).
There are plenty of unusual varieties, which may offer odd shapes such as 'Polo', 'Patty Pans Scallop Mixed' and 'Early Golden Crookneck'; or have round fruits such as 'One Ball' and 'Eight Ball'; or come in yellow and white instead of the usual green. Yellow courgettes, such as 'Jemmer', look very attractive when growing and will add colour to dishes such as ratatouille and barbecue kebabs.
* For more on growing your own veg, see Related Articles at the bottom of this page.
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