How to grow summer squash

Summer squash is a fast, prolific vine or bush crop, picked and eaten while still immature, skin, seeds and all, rather than left to cure into a hard-shelled winter type. Gardeners grow it because a handful of plants can supply a household through most of the summer, with new fruit forming every few days once the vines settle in. The plant carries separate male and female flowers on the same vine, both edible, and a productive hill can crowd out a surprising amount of garden space by midsummer.

The hardest part of growing summer squash well is keeping up with the harvest pace once plants hit their stride. University of Minnesota Extension warns that leaving oversized fruit on the vine causes the whole plant to slow its yield, not just the one fruit that got away. A second-year gardener who skips a day or two of picking during a busy week returns to find a fruit that has swollen past its prime, tough-skinned and full of hard seeds, and by then the plant has already begun redirecting energy away from setting new fruit. Removing the oversized fruit helps, but the yield dip from that stretch does not fully recover.