Courgettes

This year I'm taking a tip from a well loved GC member and I'm planting my beans through membrane. Last year I grew my beans along only one side of an A frame, one side of the frame only having three canes for structural support. It worked really well and gave my the space infront of the beans for courgettes.

My question is this. Do courgettes need to be surrounded by soil to put down their tendrils? Or will they happily grow over membrane?

Does anyone have any idea?

 

I grow my courgettes through sheets of black heavy duty polythene dpm. Cut a X with a knife, make hole with bulb planter and transplant from 3" pot. Then put and upturned 'pop' bottle with the bottom cut off on a stick pushed into the hole (mind the roots!) with the neck below the polythene, which makes watering easy when it's fully grown.

I use the same method with cucumbers, table [1] marrows, etc. and find the plants need less watering and gow bigger & healthier. The only problems are that it can lower the surface temperature by couple of degrees so they will get frosted earlier, and it can also bring on mildew quicker.

[1] For bigger marrows (& pumpkins) I'll use a mat rather than an entire sheet of polythene so the trailing stems can root into the surrounding ground.

 

Brilliant advice, thank you. I will make sure that I make a bowl shape in two spots before laying the membrane. I could double up the water supply by using the bottle method too, to make sure it gets into the X quicker.

 

I plant my courgettes / squash on a mound - to keep the stems dry - so two schools of thought on that perhaps!. I do "sink" a large flowerpot into the mound, alongside the plant, to water it via - a 2L pop-bottle would do just as well.

"I could double up the water supply by using the bottle method too, to make sure it gets into the X quicker."

My thinking is its more to direct the water down to the roots area, and stop it running "away in all directions", but also it means that the water percolates in over a period of time, so perhaps? less is wasted that way. (Keeps the stems dry too, I can't actually say how important this is in practice, although this particular family of Vegetables don't like to get their stems wet, I doubt they would actually succumb to wet-stem-rot)

 

I just grow mine "in the bed". I've got plenty of membrane, I think I'll try some this year. It must reduce evaporation from the soil, as well as saving some hand-weeding time.

 

Can't wait to get them planted at the end if the month!!