My favourite way to cook zucchini is in a small saucepan with butter and thyme. Towards the end of their fruiting life, I leave one or two zucchinis per plant to grow into a huge marrow. These are great stuffed with chilli-flavoured mince and topped with grated cheese.
It pays to have plenty of bees around the yard to pollinate your zucchini flowers. Sunflowers are especially good at attracting them. If a female zucchini flower doesn’t get pollinated properly, it won’t form a proper fruit and will end up looking like this:
You can tell male and female zucchini flowers apart by looking at the centre. The flower on the left is a female, the one on the right is male:
13 Dec 2001: Picked 3 more zucchinis.
12 Dec 2001: Picked 2 more zucchinis today. They’re starting to pile up in the fridge – if you know any good zucchini recipes, email me!
10 Dec 2001: Picked 1 zucchini.
9 Dec 2001: Picked 4 zucchinis today.
Early Nov 2001: Planted zucchini seedlings from punnets.