Cucurbita pepo
Zucchini is a tender summer squash, usually harvested young while its skin is thin and its seeds are small. It is productive in Northeast gardens and shares a plant with edible squash blossoms.1
The plant’s blossoms are edible too. Zucchini and many pumpkins are cultivars of Cucurbita pepo, even though their mature fruits look quite different.
Zucchini is a warm-season cucurbit; UMaine groups it with tomatoes and cucumbers among fruiting crops that need at least eight hours of direct sun for good production.2
That warm-climate ancestry still matters after harvest. Summer squash suffers chilling injury at ordinary refrigerator temperatures; cold can damage membranes even before visible decay, so “colder” does not always mean “better keeping” for zucchini.3
Footnotes
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University of Maine Cooperative Extension, “Food & Nutrition for the Home Gardener,” accessed July 17, 2026. ↩
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University of Maine Cooperative Extension, “Maine Home Garden News — June 2020,” 2020. ↩
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Harold McGee, On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen, rev. ed. (Scribner, 2004), PDF p. 347. ↩