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According to our team member Jana, courgettes are easy to grow and here is some advice she can give (based on her limited experience).
Once you plant the courgette seeds in propagators indoors (we planted ours in February), you'll see that they are fast growers and the seedlings are big and thick. Therefore you only need to plant one seed per propagator compartment, and there is no need for thinning them later. Once the seedlings get bigger (after about 1 month) and grow the big leaf on top, you can move them to a bigger pot (one plant in each pot), fertilise them weekly and watch them grow - they grow crazy fast!
When the plants grew big enough and the weather outside was warm enough (about mid-May), we moved them outdoors to our raised garden beds. There they quickly started developing huge yellow flowers. We learned online that there are 2 types of flowers on courgettes - male and female. The female ones get pollinated and then they start growing a little bump at their base which is the actual courgette embryo. You can see them pictured on the photos below. This process takes about 1 month (or it did in our case). It is especially important at this stage to regularly fertilise the plants as they need a lot of strength to grow the courgettes.
These 'baby courgettes' eventually grow bigger and then you just have to observe them (and keep fertilising them weekly) and try to estimate the right time when to harvest the grown courgette. We harvested our first one in the beginning of July when it was about 18cm long. It looks really healthy and we can't wait to use it in a recipe - such as this one that we published some time ago!
However it is recommended to harvest the courgettes earlier, when they're about 10–12.5cm (4–5in) long - they are supposed to be more tasty when they're younger. Regular harvesting, when the fruits are small, will encourage more to form.
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