Zucchini 'Black Beauty' (Cucurbita pepo) is the standard dark green zucchini, and one of the most forgiving vegetables a home gardener can start from seed. Plants grow quickly and crop heavily over a long season, holding glossy, even fruit that eats best picked young.
What it does
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Fruit you keep picking. It crops heavily across a long season, and taking fruit young is what keeps the next set coming behind it.
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Even, dark green fruit. Glossy skin and uniform shape, best around 15 to 20cm long, with a mild flavour that takes grilling and baking equally well.
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Quick from seed. Plants establish fast in warm conditions and reach the first harvest 6 to 8 weeks from planting.
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A beginner's crop. In healthy soil it grows strongly without mulching or added fertiliser, so there is very little to get wrong.
How to use it
Sow through spring and summer across most of the country, or year round in warm climates where the soil never really cools. Choose full sun and fertile, well drained soil, sow at the depth printed on the packet, and keep the seedbed moist until the seedlings are up.
Space plants 60 to 80cm apart. That gap keeps air moving between the leaves, and a few extra plants at a generous spacing return more fruit than the same number crowded. Start picking at 15 to 20cm and keep at it, because fruit left to size up slows everything behind it.
What it suits
In the ground. Open vegetable beds give a heavy cropper the soil volume and root run it wants, with room to hold the full spacing.
Raised beds. Soil warms earlier in spring here, which brings the first pick forward, though a raised bed dries faster and watering has to keep pace.
Large containers. It performs well in a big, freely draining pot with room to spread. One plant to a pot, not two. Seed is delivered Australia wide,.
This is not a balcony or windowsill crop. Each plant fills the space it is given and needs full sun to crop properly, so it earns its place in a food garden.
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