For the past several years I’ve had very little success with butternut squash, but courgettes have been very different. Both green and yellow varieties have added to our kitchen table year after year.

This year I was rather late getting to grips with the greenhouse and vegetable garden due to a period of poor health, but eventually dug around to see what seed packets I had in store. I didn’t find any green courgette seeds but did discover a three-year-old almost empty packet (just four seeds) of the golden yellow variety, Golden Dawn III F1, dated 2005 and to be sown by last year

Not sure whether they’d germinate or not, I put one each in four small and even-older peat pots filled with general purpose compost, watered them liberally and left them in a shady corner of the greenhouse to see what happened. All four are now thriving as rapidly developing seedlings and last night I put them in the ground outside.

For each plant I had dug an 18-inch deep hole, put a layer kitchen waste (straight from the kitchen composting bin) in the bottom, covered this with a layer of well-rotted farmyard manure, covered that with a layer of shredded paper, and then backfilled the hole with a mixture of one part manure to two parts of the soil taken out when digging the hole. So from last night my four courgette plants, about three feet apart to give them a fair amount of room, are luxuriating in a nutritious soil which I hope will lead to another great harvest.

We still have a slight risk of late frost here in mid-May, but I’ll have to put a bit of fleece over them if the weather forecast looks threatening.

Happy growing,

- David -

Tags: Courgettes

Today I was in several city-centre bookshops and noticed that one of them in particular was displaying vegetable garden books in a big way, so I thought I’d follow suit here. Below I’m showing some of what appear to be the most popular kitchen garden titles here in the UK.

I’ve put three of our British authors and TV gardening presenters (Carol Klein, Alan Titchmarsh and Sarah Raven) on the first line of the Amazon.com display as these books appear to be most readily available outside the UK.

Happy reading, and happy vegetable growing.

- David Murray -