Zucchini Costata Romanesco – Cucurbita pepo.

This is a very tasty Italian heirloom zucchini or courgette.

It has  a really nice flavour but has drawbacks in that it tends to be a bit irregular in shape and size and generally tastes better when left to get larger and develops the raised ridges and coloured stripes. The tiny ones tend to be hard to harvest and cut off and are usually bulky and unattractive. But sliced crosswise you end up with some very nice star shapes and the flavour really is nice. Even the large fruits taste great sliced and simmered briefly in some vegetable or chicken stock.

The plants leaves get quite large up to about 1 metre plus in height and the stems are heavily spiked with little irritating prickly spines causing much scratching to your arms when harvesting. They love water but don’t like it overhead on the leaves and the stems will also rot quickly if they sit on damp ground for any length of time. It’s best to raise them up on straw or run them up an earth ridge. They grow for a long period of time from spring though summer till autumn and will just keep going till the weather cools down.