When buying planting material at garden markets, instead of zucchini, you can buy cucumbers and vice versa, since it is rather difficult for an inexperienced gardener to distinguish zucchini seedlings from cucumbers, especially at the age of five to seven days. Plants are green, cotyledon leaves have just spread out, not even fully grown yet.
How to distinguish seedlings of zucchini from cucumber?
Before you go to the market for seedlings (the seed-growing seedling material from the nursery is beyond doubt), you still need to carefully look at the pictures in specialized sources. If you suddenly mixed zucchini with cucumbers in seedlings during home sowing, it is quite easy to distinguish them, you just need to compare the appearance.
Three factors together serve as a rather cardinal difference: the shape, size and thickness of the cotyledon leaves.
The first (not yet real) leaves of cucumber seedlings are slightly more oblong, have a rounded tip (almost a perfect elongated ellipse), rather thin to the touch. Any photo confirms this fact.
Cotyledonsthe leaves of squash seedlings are more rounded, the tips are slightly pointed, they themselves are thick, slightly folded.
If you pick up two embryos, one will be larger, the stem is thicker - this is a zucchini, the other is smaller in size, the stem is thinner - this is a cucumber.
And since it is not always possible to distinguish seedlings of zucchini from cucumbers in the phase of cotyledon leaves, it is enough to wait until real leaves appear - no one's advice will be needed here: zucchini develops rapidly in the phase of the first true leaf, and cucumbers seem to freeze for a few days in infancy.
When to plant zucchini?
The timing of planting zucchini is affected by two circumstances: return frosts and the beginning of the fruiting period:
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Since zucchini is a subspecies of pumpkin, it means that this plant is heat-loving, completely intolerant of frost. Low night temperatures also do not please him. Based on this, we can conclude that it is not worth planting it in open ground earlier than mid-May - early June. Why open ground? Zucchini has never been the main garden crop, so the question of finding them in greenhouses is never worth it. Usually they are given the remaining space from other landings.
- Zucchini before fruiting develops within fifty to sixty days. There are three types of zucchini: early, medium ripening and late varieties. So that there are fresh zucchini on the table during the summer-autumn season (it is believed that whatthe smaller the zucchini, the more delicate the dish from it), you need to plant them, choosing the ripening time. You can plant all varieties at once, the first fruits will appear at different times. You can plant the same variety with a break of ten days, then the beginning of fruiting, and therefore the death of the plant will come in the same order.
How to plant zucchini: through seedlings or directly into open ground?
In a warm spring (the climate of the southern regions of the Russian Federation), zucchini is planted directly in open ground.
In the central zone of the Russian Federation, when planting zucchini even in the second decade of May is impractical in the open ground, gardeners begin to deal with seedlings of early-ripening varieties of zucchini. The differences between seedlings of cucumbers and zucchini in terms of growth rate and plant size are striking: after the appearance of the first cotyledon leaves, the zucchini at a temperature of twenty to twenty-five degrees (normal window sill conditions) gives two real large leaves in a week, and a week later there are already five. How to plant such a huge plant in open ground, how not to damage the roots? Therefore, seedlings of zucchini are placed in fairly cold conditions with temperatures up to fifteen degrees. Then the vegetable does not grow so rapidly.
The usual practice of planting zucchini in the middle lane of the Russian Federation
In mid-May, seed preparation begins: after rejection, their germination is determined (placed in a solution of s alt water), then the seeds are soaked, wrapped in a wet napkin for two days, then placed for a day on the bottom shelf of the refrigerator, then again kept in wet paper towel until sprouting.
When the sproutwill be up to two-thirds of the length of the seed, the plant can be planted in the ground. Planting depth - one and a half to two centimeters.
Planted seeds should be covered with a film at night so that the soil does not cool. You can close it with a spunbond, and shoots will appear faster and you will not need to constantly monitor the state of soil moisture. In two or three days, friendly shoots will appear, in a month at summer temperatures (not lower than eighteen to twenty degrees during the day, provided that night temperatures do not fall below twelve degrees), the plant will begin to bloom. Two weeks after that, you can harvest.
This method of planting sweeps aside all doubts about the belonging of a plant to a species, the question of how to distinguish seedlings of zucchini from cucumber can not be asked in this situation.
Where can I plant zucchini?
By the middle of May, the places in the garden plot are usually planned out. You can easily allocate a place for seedlings of zucchini, but you need to imagine in advance that these are huge bushes or lashes. The bushes need a lot of space, and the whips will constantly crawl onto other ridges. Therefore, there is simply no better place than a compost heap.
There, the zucchini is spacious, warm, nothing obscures them, the soil is fertile. You just need to remember about increased watering and weeding.
What should I do if the zucchini blooms, but there are no fruits?
In an adult plant, there are two types of flowers - male (they have stamens) and female (having a pistil). Bees are needed for pollination. How to attract them tozucchini? Water the plants with a sweet odorous syrup, for this you can dilute the old jam. The bees will surely come.
But in wet rainy weather, even this method will not affect the ripening of zucchini. Therefore, many gardeners comprehend the art of pollination (work instead of bees). Armed with brushes, they remove pollen from male flowers and transfer them to female ones. Some pluck the male flowers and cover the female ones with them. The result is artificial pollination.
