First Summer Harvest

We picked the first item out of the garden today, a zucchini!  This is a small miracle for us.  For the last 3 years (since my daughter was born in 2009) I have been dreadfully late planting things in the garden.  In fact, Memorial Day weekend has been the weekend when I got around to planting everything in the garden.  This year I was able to plant the seeds in March.  This is a little early but the weather was so warm I figured what the heck.  We had two nights close to freezing but everything survived.

Here it is playing hide and seek.

I was poking around to see if there were any bees and noticed it hiding under some stems.  I have not seen a lot of bees around the squash patch so this was a pleasant surprise.  I have about 4 zukes that have aborted because of lack of pollination.

Here it is in all of its glory!

This is my first time growing this type of zucchini.  It is called a Costata Romanesco.  I first heard about them lurking in the vegetable gardening forum at GardenWeb.  Folks raved about the taste it so I decided to try it this year.  Here is the description of Costata Romanesco from Johnny's Seeds:

Distinctive Italian zucchini, prominently ribbed. Medium gray-green, with pale green flecks and ribs. Big, large-leafed bush with only about half the yield of hybrids, but much better tasting; clearly better textured, nutty, and delicious, raw or cooked. Also a good producer of heavy male blossom buds for cooking

While I have not tasted it yet, their description of the leaf and blossoms is spot on.  Hopefully we will get quite a few zucchinis off these plants before they succumb to squash vine borers (more on those in a future post).

Are you getting anything out of the garden yet?