🍅
Fruiting vegetables
Zucchini & Pumpkin
The crop everyone jokes about giving away by the boxful. Space accordingly.
Get your planting dates
This guide covers how to grow, harvest and keep zucchini & pumpkin, deliberately without sowing dates,
because the right date depends entirely on your climate zone. GardenBuddy's planting calendar
covers all seven Australian climate zones and will tell you exactly when to sow where you live.
Growing
Full sun, plenty of room to sprawl (pumpkin especially), and rich, well-composted soil. Zucchini is famously productive from a single healthy plant.
Common problems
- Powdery mildew, near universal by late season
- Poor fruit set from insufficient pollination, hand-pollinate with a paintbrush if bee activity is low
- Vine borer in some regions, mound soil over stem nodes to encourage extra rooting
Harvest
Zucchini: pick young and often, oversized fruit turns woody. Pumpkin: leave on the vine until the stem starts to dry and the skin resists a fingernail, then cure in the sun for 1-2 weeks before storing.
Preserving this crop
Best suited to:
FreezingRoot Cellaring & Long StorageDrying & Dehydrating
Seed saving
Difficulty: Moderate. Both cross-pollinate within their species, isolate varieties or hand-pollinate for true seed. Pumpkin seed needs the fruit fully mature and stored a few weeks before extraction.