Courgettes

[itsybitsy]

I only planted a few courgettes this year and although they are coming on a treat, one of the plants has yellow courgettes! I have not seen this before. Are they safe to eat? I understand that the yellow colour can be the result of some kind of deficiency in the soil, but other than that I really don't know much more about it.

[GillyBee]

Some varieties of courgette are bright yellow and very good too. Do you know what variety you planted? If the leaves & courgettes all look healthy then I would say you have a yellow variety.
For any courgette, disgustingly bitter fruit should NOT be eaten at all. The bitterness is a warning that a stressed or otherwise dodgy plant is producing a toxin which will give you a dose of D&V.

[jansman]

Yellow courgette are smashing. They are good on a barbecue- mind you , so are green ones.

[itsybitsy]

Well, regardless of colour my two plants have yielded four courgettes between them. FOUR!?

[jansman]

Well, regardless of colour my two plants have yielded four courgettes between them. FOUR!?

The heat and lack of rain have stuffed a lot of crops. My runner beans are the worst ever,yet my Blue Lake beans - French- are excellent. My marrows and squashes are not fantastic either. It’s why I am moving to perennials.

[jennyjj01]

Well, regardless of colour my two plants have yielded four courgettes between them. FOUR!?

Four... You were lucky to only get four! Think of the guilt of not eating them fast enough and ending up wasting them. After three weeks I was sick to death of them.

The trick seems to be to harvest them while they are barely 4 inches long. That encourages more to appear, like magic. Also, plants from the same batch can have very different yields, so we need to ruthlessly cull the weaklings. One strong courgette plant can yield more than a glut. They need rather a lot of room. One plant can easily take half a square metre planter. They also need lots of water.

Maybe your yellow ones were a low yielding strain. Do you know what variety you sowed?

[itsybitsy]

I just sowed what was in the packet (left over from last year, I think ) and last year there were no yellow courgettes. The yield (or lack of) is disappointing though.

My beans have done well, although the yellow ones (seeds left from last year) have done poorly compared to the purple ones (this years) in terms of size and yield, so that's interesting, because the packet states they should be good for a couple of years, but perhaps not *that* good.

[GillyBee]

Courgettes are big greedy plants If all you are getting is male flowers, it suggests they are stressed in some way. Try feeding them with tomato food and make sure they are not allowed to dry out. It may also be the heat. I have had lots of female fowers start to form then turn yellow and fall off my Trombocino courgettes before the flowers even open. They are getting lots of food & water so I am hoping things will improve with the reduced temperatures.
The others are doing better but the ends of the courgettes keep starting to rot which is annoying. It is either the difficulty of keeping the soil moist in the heat in that veg bed causing a blossom end rot or a pollination fault but have taken to hand pollinating just in case.....

[jennyjj01]

The others are doing better but the ends of the courgettes keep starting to rot which is annoying. It is either the difficulty of keeping the soil moist in the heat in that veg bed causing a blossom end rot or a pollination fault but have taken to hand pollinating just in case.....

Ah! Some of mine rotted at the flower end. I was wondering why.

[GillyBee]

Nice explanation of Blossom End Rot here
https://www.canr.msu.edu/news/blossom_e ... vegetables
And pollination problems here:
https://extension.umd.edu/resource/poll ... vegetables