Grow zucchini vertically to save space in the garden!

Hello everybody, in this video I'm going to show you how I trellis my zucchini plant. So this is my zucchini plant, it's about 5 feet tall and the way I've got it trellised is I put a bamboo stake in the ground and I've had it grow up the bamboo stake. The main zucchini came out of the ground here and as it grows I would strap it to the stake that I have in the ground, in this case it's a bamboo rod, and as it keeps growing and growing and growing I keep adding more straps and as you'll see here this is where the new growth is coming. So every few days I will add another strap and you just have to be careful when adding the straps so that it doesn't knock off any new growth of the flowers or new zucchinis growing and you just keep adding straps as you go. So a few reasons to trellis your zucchini plant or have it grow vertical is, the big one is it's saving space for me. I have a small plot here for my garden and growing it vertically saves a lot of space in the garden. The second reason is to reduce the instance of disease or pests affecting the plant. When it's up off the ground things like powdery mildew have a little bit of a harder chance to get onto the leaves and pests that are walking by, whether it be bugs or maybe even little critters, won't be eating the fruit of the zucchini or at least it's a lot harder for them to get to it because it's not just laying on the ground, it's way up here. Another reason is the plant will dry out faster, say if it gets wet from rain, more air flow around the leaves which is also great at reducing disease. As I mentioned, one of the main reasons to do this is to reduce the instance of pests or diseases affecting the plant. Sometimes the powdery mildew will still affect the plant when it's vertical. You'll see this leaf is starting to be affected by the powdery mildew with white spots forming and this will take over the leaf and it could spread to the rest of the plant if I don't do something about it. So what I've been doing is been trimming off the leaves on the plant when they're no longer useful. Now, how do you know when the leaves are no longer useful? Well, each leaf is connected to either a fruit or a flower. So to show that, this leaf here is connected to this big mass of zucchini here that's growing. And this leaf here, that's going out right there, is connected to this flower. So once the flower is done or I've harvested the zucchini, I will then cut off the leaf. So this leaf here had a zucchini on it that I've cut off. I no longer need this leaf and the leaf could be susceptible to powdery mildew. So I will just cut it off since it's not useful anymore. And the leaf over here that's starting to become affected by the powdery mildew, which is this one right here, this has a flower stem on it. But if you look over there, that one that's wiggling, there's no flower. The flower's fallen off so it's finished. So I'm going to snip that one off because this one is becoming affected by the powdery mildew anyway and it's no longer useful. I don't want the powdery mildew to spread. I'll also snip off that flower stalk there. Don't need that either. So that's why I trellis my zucchini plant and thanks for watching the video.