ZUCCHINI

[Vanessa Thompson (pomare)]

whats eating my zucchini leaves. When i first brought the plants, they had 2 soft large leaves and two smaller ones in center. The center ones have growing heaps, with 4 more following suite.
BUT the two outer leaves. (they are soft and thicker to touch) Have been slowly eaten and gone yellow. But the rest are great????? Besides my baby bending a few of the leaves. (im glad i put the wire fence up)
I need to get a camera......one day have to borrow my sisters.

[Elaine de Saxe]

The two lower soft thick leaves on the zucchini are the cotyledons or seed leaves - i.e. the first ones out of the seed. They wither and die as the plant takes back the nutrients. Whatever is eating them (eg grasshoppers) will likely make food for something else anyway. They sound as though they are growing as expected. Zucchs like all the members of the cucumber family (Cucurbitaceae) love the heat so we are now entering zucchini season. It's a question of put the seeds in and run like mad ;-) or at least check them every day, cukes and zucchs especially grow *very* fast once they get going. And don't worry about the stack of male (long-stemmed) flowers you will see first - cucumber family always do that for reasons known only to them. Female flowers will follow in due course and if you've plenty of honey bees or other bees about, fertilisation will be swift and enthusiastic.

[Vanessa Thompson (pomare)]

Oh cool......thats what they do. Then it sounds normal. (so about the grasshoppers, i hope the malacis mix will do the trick) They are next to the row of cucumbers..............but if we have no bee's about, how do i get them to cross polinate....is that name of what they do?? (gee i better learn how to spell all these garden terms and names lol)
Thanks.

[Elaine de Saxe]

malacis mix ... what is this?

Grasshoppers can be a bit of a pest but birds usually deal with them, if you can put up with a few holes in leaves, they are not really a problem.

Bees are generally about, lots of people keep a hive or two of honeybees in their yards and/or there are feral hives of honeybees. There are many species of native bees both stingless social and solitary and you could have one to several of these species flying about especially in the warmer months.

You can hand pollinate (cross pollination is between varieties or species though) using a soft brush. Early morning take the pollen from the male flower and transfer it gently to the female flower. With the cucumber family, the flowers are quite big (except for chokos) and easy to deal with. Usually you won't have to hand pollinate because there are enough bees around.

The female flowers have an obvious embryo under the flower. When the flower is pollinated it dies - actually the flower dies after a day, pollination or not - then the embryo starts to grow rapidly. Once the plant reaches sexual maturity and starts reproducing, then it does it quite quickly, zucchini especially. The fruits just about grow before your eyes, hence you need to check each day to pick the ones at the size you want and often smaller is more favoured for flavour. If you let a zucchini fruit get out of control you can have this green thing about 2 feet long by about 6 inches or so in diameter. It cooks up well for dog food or does fine for compost but the delicate flavour is lost. If you are keeping a fruit for seed it needs to be *enormous*.

[Donna]

I find that zucchini (and pumpkins) tend to get white powdery mildew on their leaves very easily in our climate - or at least in my garden! To avoid this, you shouldn't water the actual leaves rather the dirt under them.

If you do get this on the lower leaves you can pick them off, if you get it on the whole plant you can use Anthony's EM (bugs) mixed with water and spray on the whole plant. If you don't have EM, you can use a mixture of milk & water (I used half/ half) in a spray bottle and spray this quite liberally (until the milk runs down in little rivers on the leaves) and it worked for me last year.

[Vanessa Thompson (pomare)]

Thanks guys, ill have to remember to let one grow for seeds. and hope some bee's are out and about. (i havent seen any bee's, maybe the zucchini and pumpkin will attrack them?)
And woo hoo, got the EM and any sign of white powder, they shall be sprayed and try milk too. heehee

Molasses. (i spelled it wrong up top lol (I asked florence and on my page......................... Molasses is a sugar processing byproduct.. there's a few uses in the garden including getting rid of nematodes & spraying to prevent chewing insects... There's a couple of recipes in the links below, or do a search on the discussions........
http://www.annettemcfarlane.com/Doityourself.htm
http://www.abc.net.au/gardening/stories/s2607562.htm

[Vanessa Thompson (pomare)]

ok, back to zuks......thanks elaine about telling me about the soft thick leaves are cotyldons or seeds leaves.....well before i asked..... on one of my zuks, i pulled these off...thinking they were going yellow and going dead anyhow........now my poor plant that i did take off the leaves, isnt doing so good and very small compared to the rest. (oh and one leave off one of the others...but he seems to been doing fine but not as big as the other two heehee)(the rest are nice green and getting huge, touching each other).

Well anyhow, i pulled him out of the garden and put him the experiment of the up side down buckets. He was very yellow when i moved him (2 days ago) He is starting to get some green life back into him and few more stalks and leaves but what else is he missing that would help him go go go.......what is he missing compared to the others?
(ive also, done the EM, flovic and seaweed dose's) I think these helped, as he is starting to go green again.

[Donna]

Depending on what part of the plant is yellow it might point to a trace element (magnesium?), or even major (nitrogen?) element deficiency in that plant. Even though the trace elements might be in the soil, sometimes if the pH is wrong the plant can't access the nutrients.

If you have already moved him and he is looking greener, did you add more/ different dirt or compost to the bucket as this might have been enough to remedy the problem...

It would help if you could be more descriptive of the problems so I can look up my books - was it the old leaves, new leaves, stems, veins of the leaves, speckles, etc.

I personally have found that zukes need extra calcium (like tomatoes) in my soil as mine seem to suffer from 'blossom end rot' where the bottom of the fruit goes all rotten but this isn't something that causes the leaves to yellow - at least not in mine.

[Vanessa Thompson (pomare)]

Hope this makes scence ummm all the leaves were yellow, whole leave and some of the stems too....starting to green up a little tho i noticed but he is less then 1/4 of the size then the others and very small leaves like he is still new, like i first got him??? (the biggest leave i damaged when pulling thru hole and is going brown, should i snip this off) lots more stems have started to grow now and they seem to be the healthy green But yeah, the whole plant would be smaller then my hand size and has about 8 laeves/stems out and ive just gone and had a look, looks like little buds for flowers about 6 and about 4-5 more stems.leaves also???
The dirt is from another part of the garden tho, not from were i took him from. (The whole garden got the same treatment, but the place were ive taken the dirt, i havent got anything growing there yet )
ok im going to surf around the net too see if i can find a pic of zuks........I real need a camera or too buy cord for our phones so i can up load pics from that.

[Donna]

Okay, no idea! Some seeds/ plants just grow better than others, so it might just be that one is always going to be the 'runt' of the litter... If it is growing again now, I would just leave it alone and see how it goes.

The broken leaf is fine to snip off - as long as there is leaves left on a plant to help it grow it is normally fine to cut off any leaves that look sick, diseased or brown.

[Vanessa Thompson (pomare)]

okey dokey, see what happens with him and how he goes. :)

[Vanessa Thompson (pomare)]

I think my problem has something to do with the soil..........where i took him from and tomato plant and im thinking of moving the 1 pumpkin and 1 cucumber too.........the rows go one way but right on the end of each of these rows.......where all these plants are growing.......the plants dont seem to be doing well???? MMMM
(right thats it, im going to get my sisters camera and taken some pics to show you's.......then you will know what im going on about hehehehehehe)

[Florence]

It's usually not a good idea to move pumpkins and cucumbers etc unless you really have to as they resent root disturbance, and will stunt their growth.....
If your mobile have email function, you maybe able to email them to BLF, you will find your photo upload email address when you go to the photos tab and click on 'add photos'