This column will help answer your annual decision: which zucchini will you grow this year?
Unlike tomatoes, zucchini are too prolific to plant a range of them, and zucchini slice, zucchini chocolate cake and zucchini pickles are really just ways to disguise zucchini.
In moist, cloudy years, yellow zucchini easily outperform green zucchini.
You can buy yellow non-hybrid varieties suitable for seed saving, but sadly the hybrid zucchini gold F1 seems to be far more prolific and pretty much the same in taste and texture. It's also more resistant to powdery mildew.
In droughts and hot summers, the old fashioned Black Jack or Black Beauty varieties, both non-hybrids, seem to do better in our climate.
You can even let a couple grow to monsters with mature seeds inside to save for next year.
But if we're going to have a hot summer punctuated by the odd thunderstorm, which seems likely, then the hybrid dark green zucchini nitro will probably do far better than the non-hybrids, as ''dry dry wet dry dry" is perfect downy and powdery mildew weather, and zucchini nitro is one of the most resistant varieties to both.
The variety of zucchini labelled Lebanese in Australia is also non-hybrid, and seems to be a good all-round, though paler than the other green zucchini.
Yellow and green button zucchini - also sold as button squash - have scalloped edges, but the skin soon grows hard if you don't pick them often, and their texture is squishier than others.
I love golden arch crookneck zucchini, partly because there tend to be enough long green things on my plate, like beans or asparagus, but rarely anything warty, crooked, and fat at one end and thin at the other.
There is also a non-arching crookneck which is a bit fatter at one end than the other, but if you don't want a decent arch, why bother?
There is also a stunning striped zucchini, but I can never find the seeds for it.
It's as over-productive as every other variety, and spectacular enough to grow in the front garden.
My absolute favourite though is Ronde de Nice - perfectly round, and with a firmer texture than any other zucchini I've tasted. Ronde de Nice also have excellent structural integrity.
Pick them and toss them into ratatouille or any other vegetable stew five minutes before the end of cooking.
As with all zucchini, give them fertile soil, regular watering, full sun, mulch well and keep them away from the grass at the edge of the garden, where it will be more humid at ground level. Zucchini do not like humidity.
If you plant older varieties it's best to plant more in January for a continuous harvest until the frosts, but modern hybrids will crop all season.
Pick often - the best zucchini are finger size, far smaller than commercial ones, and snap instead of bend.
Even with daily picking you will still find the inevitable monster lurking below the leaves.
Cut it in half and feed it to the chooks, or scoop out half the flesh, stuff with something delicious, and bake till soft.
If you want to indulge in zucchini sculpture, all you need is string, wool or sticky tape.
Wait till your zucchini has lost its flower and is about finger sized - any smaller and it may snap. Carefully and gently tie string around any point you wish to stay small and wasp-waisted, or use sticky tape for more interesting shapes.
One of my favourites is a series of zucchini bulges, though kids enjoy creating zucchini shapes that have a neck, head and waist.
Further sculpture has to wait till the zucchini is picked. Insert two carrot stick arms, carve legs into the base, and use a small sharp knife to remove the peel so your zucchini appears to have a smiling mouth, a nose, eyes and eyebrows and stripes for hair.
I've even managed to create a zucchini wombat by taping off the top of the juvenile zucchini so it grew round instead of long, with a tiny nose at one end.
Carve ear shapes, add four stumpy carrot legs and a peel on a grin and two eyes above the "nose" and you have a green edible wombat ... and at least one more use for the surplus that every zucchini grower must endure.
This week I am:
- Watching rose after rose unfold as Possum X finally gets tired of eating every rose bud. The white and yellow Lady Banks roses are blooming too, and even Possum X finds it difficult to chew the flowers from their arching canes;
- Planting small, fast maturing watermelons and rockmelons that mature in 55-65 days- indescribably delicious when eaten fully ripened and fresh from the garden;
- Filling vases with deep purple bearded Iris and branches of pale blue Louisiana iris;
- Making a note to buy advanced basil plants- they grow so fast you can begin picking the leaves almost at once;
- Weeding, weeding, weeding...the last lot of bushfire winds spread decades of weeds seeds over thousands of kilometres;
- Breathing in spicy lungfuls of Port Wine Magnolia (really a Michela figo) and a hundred other scents as I pass the front steps. Spring is wonderful.
