Green or Yellow - Which is Best?

Sunday was mild but we only had a few short spells of sunshine followed by some light rain late into the afternoon.

 

Like you do I’ve been following the current blog postings and comments discussing the pros and cons of green v yellow courgettes. To be honest it’s not something I’d given a lot of thought to and I’ve always assumed little difference between the two. So I did a little digging into my harvesting records to see what they revealed.

 

Unfortunately I can only really refer to this year’s records as in past years despite my best efforts our green varieties of courgette plants often seem to get mixed up and at harvesting time it can be difficult to tell one variety of green fruit from another. This year we haven’t got that problem as we limited ourselves to just two varieties only Jemmer (yellow) and Zucchini (green). Then along came a packet of free seeds of Tondo di Piacenza which I couldn’t resist sowing but as it’s a round green variety it can easily be identified at harvesting time.

 

All the seeds were sown at the same time, in the same compost, given the same treatment, potted on at the same time and planted out on the plot on the same day. Now it gets a bit more tricky as there’s and extra plant of both Jemmer and Tondo di Piacenza whilst one Zucchini plant succumbed to the cold wet weather.

 

So here’s a list of our harvesting up to and including Saturday 15 September.

 

Now we’ve done our best to pick fruits on a regular basis and not allow any courgettes to grow into marrows which they have a tendency to do at an alarming rate.

 

That means we’ve harvested a staggering 170 courgettes weighing in at 42.5kg of which we’ve eaten, frozen and given away lots resulting in very few going to waste. I reckon Tondo di Piacenza has been our star performer and we’ll be giving it another go next year. Given there’s two less Zucchini plants than Jemmer we’ve not got that much difference in performance between yellow and green types.

So there’s a completely unscientific set of results but certainly for us it shows that this year we haven’t had much difference between these two colours of courgettes.