A Gardeners Forum Forums General Discussion The Food Garden Forum Vegetable Gardening Overgrown Squash

This is my first year gardening in our new home and I must admit I wasn't expecting our seedlings to do so well. My zucchini squash has become a monster. The fruit are just coming in and it has become apparent there will be no room for them to develop amongst all the foliage in the space I've provided. What can I do? Cut back leaves? Take down the fence? Thin out some of the 5 mature plants?

Any help is appreciated.

Welcome!

If you could post a photo, that would be useful.

Do NOT cut the leaves.

How close together are your plants? You mention a fence, are they growing up a fence? It's sort of hard to recommend anything without seeing it first. For now, until you can snap a pic & post it, I'd just leave them be. You'll be surprised how good zucchini are at doing what they need to do.

Hey Marica,

They're Huge, I obviously have them too close together. There are 5 plants total in 2 mounds in a 4'x 4' area with a 24" high chicken wire fence on 3- sides. The leaves are draping over the fence at this point and I'm worried the leaf stalks are occupying most of the space where the squash will lay. I probably would have been okay with only 2-3 plants in 1 mound- but what do I do now?

I'm all for intensive gardening, but this sounds a little crowded.

What do others think?

You planted three seeds in each mound and 5 came up. Three seeds is fine, but zucchini is just going to go & go along one or a few main stems.

One of my concerns is air flow. What you have is basically a three-sided box, and that's probably going to cut down on air circulation AND THAT is inviting a whole host of problems. Can you remove the chicken wire? What's beyond your little zucchini pen? Is it your lawn? Or is it more garden? If you're worried that the zucchini is going to get out onto the grass or whatever, you can remove the wire and lay the stems on pieces of cardboard. If it's more of your garden, just let it go where it wants. You might have a time getting around (!) but it won't hurt anything.

Curious to hear what others think.

Hi tchamber!
I had the same issue this year! This is my first ever garden so I over planted in a very big way. I mean lets face it, it's hard to image seeds THAT tiny will turn into such large plants! Pretty cool tho! I had to thin my zuchini, cucumbers, and even my tomato plants. Once the plants were big enough to transplant I moved some of them to another area in my garden, and even gave some of them away to my Mom who decided to use them in a container garden. Unfortunately some of the plants had to just be pulled out to make room for the others. But I'm glad I bit the bullet now because the ones I left are much happier and healthier.

Also, I can't tell if you said the plants are growing up the chicken wire or not, but have you thought about using just plain old tomato cages? It's def not a conventional use for tomato cages, but they come in varying sizes for ooober cheap and if you place them around zuchini or cucumber plants they automatically just climb right up! Saves on space but also alows for air flow like Marcia mentioned! One small tomato cage will support 2-3 zuchini vines.

Good luck and let us know what you come up with!

Yup, I'd pull the weakest looking plants so that I have no more than 2-3 in a mound area of that size.

If you decide to thin at this stage, you might want to just cut them off at the base. Pulling might really disrupt the roots of the others. Just a thought.