So as I've previously stated I'm new at gardening myself (because I never owned a house), but always had a garden my father tended to growing up. Usually the basics for him every year. Tomatoes (he loved them, me meh not so much), corn, string beans, radishes, cucumbers, eggplant. He made it seem effortless to me, except when he hunted the tomato horn worms, he got a special satisfaction in destroying them. But never zucchini and I'm beginning to realize why. We got plenty of zuccs from our neighbor next door who loved growing them. So we never had a lack of them all summer.
Fast forward to last year and I was finally able to have my own garden. Zucchini were definitely on my list because I love them grilled. Both yellow and the standard green. Unfortunately when we bought the house it was February and I plotted out the garden late March/April. Plenty of all day sun at that point. Then the trees filled in and the area stayed damp and mostly sunless. Not great for growing anything and a habitat for mold and fungus. I ended up with little to no fruit (great big and full plants that reached up for the sun was all I could muster. The zucchinis was attacked by what I believe now was a vine borer, or it was so damp the stems rotted. The rest were taken by PWM and not one zucchini... The plants did really well for some time and when they did I realized you need way more room to grow them then I had thought. They walked three feet across the garden and onto the grass to try and get to the sun. So I learned some things...
This year (before the gardening season) I had already plotted out a new space for the garden and was contemplating not growing any squash at all because of the space it took up. The I found some videos on Youtube where people grew them vertically on stakes. I moved and enlarged the garden and decided to try this method I had never seen done before. Now I know some people have used tomato cages for the more "bushy" varieties and that seems to work well, but I wanted to do something where I could keep the leaves off the ground and at the same time prevent the plants from walking across the yard and doing what they wanted. Everything I have read so far seemed positive. I'm able to easily prune the plant when the leaves get so big that they are encroaching on the space of each other and their other garden mates. Also by pruning I'm able to allow more light and airflow to the plant, which if it does nothing else makes it much more easy for bees and other pollinators to transverse the plant and get from flower to flower. Keeping the big leaves out of the dirt was appealing to me because most diseases are soil born (although mold fungus spores probably get carries by wind). Also makes it a little more difficult for other pests that come from the ground to get to the leaves. Less foliage should also helps the plant to send more nutrients to the fruit instead of to old leaves which are on the bottom of the plant and are probably shaded from the sun anyway.
So far so good, I'm seeing fruiting on all the plants so far this year and am watching pollinators actually working the plants. Including squash bees, Who I misidentified as miner bees at first, who have made a home in the ground along the wood border of my garden.
To do this was simple. When the plants stared to grow their secondary leaf set, I could have just done this the minute I planted them, I drove a stake into the ground about 3 inches behind each one. I then gently tied each one with garden twine to the stake. As the plant grows I tie it up the main vine for more support, and trim the leaves and male flower stems (after the flower falls off) below the first fruit. I'll also remove damaged leaves, or leaves that grow over other plants.
I was really happy with the way things were going until I saw that vine borer moth... Hopefully this wasn't all in vain, that I can prevent the worm from getting in the stem, or I can get a good yield of fruit before they wipe out the plants.
