I really love Renee's Garden "Raven", it doesn't sprawl and the taste is great. It's also very productive. I even tasted the baby squash with the blossom still on it, very tasty. :) happy gardening

I really like Costata Romanesco. It's the first zuch that wasn't all about the onions and garlic for me. :-)

I will second Costata Romanesco. Fantastic zucchini. My friend who lives in the woods always asks me if I have any extra Romanesco because she loves them so much. They have a great flavor.

Bellatrix

As far as zucchini goes, I am a big fan of, Dark Star. I grow this variety every year along with Cocozelle and Golden zucchini. It produces a great number, and has a really nice flavor when roasted.

Thanks! I am always intrigued by Italian varieties, so the Costata Romanesco sounds good. I'll also keep an eye out for Dark Star and Raven, if I can keep fighting the squash bugs and the borers!

add my vote for Costata Romanesco. In addition to good taste, it seems to hold up under striped cucumber beetle attack. I battle the bugs but last year another variety succumbed but this one didn't.

This year I'm checking for eggs and squishing whatever I find. Yesterday it was a couple of adult squash bugs and some teeny just hatched bugs. A master gardener told me to squish the eggs, not just scrape them off. If too queesy to squish, scrape into bucket of soap water.

OK, y'all've sold me on the Costata Romanesco!

Defrost, I squish eggs with the best of them! However, we haven't yet had cucumber beetles -- just squash bugs and Mexican bean beetles. And I live in perpetual fear of the squash vine borers.... It's always something, ain't it?

I've come to discover that, flavor-wise, what I like in a zuke and what others seem to like in a zuke is totally different. Last year I grew Cocozelle, and was under the impression that it was supposed to have a nice flavor. Well, from my garden, they all tasted like dirt. Literally, like mouthfulls of soil. So this year, I decided to go with the general "favorite" and I planted Costata Romanesco. Again, I've found that if I let them go more than 2 days after they've bloomed (at the point where they begin darkening up in color) they also taste like dirt. On the upside, they make absolutely giant blooms, and the zucchini, when picked the morning the blossoms open, are tender, sweet, mild-flavored, and the blossoms are a treat.

I'm beginning to wonder whether the flavor that's valued in zucchini is what I think of as tasting like dirt, or if it's my growing conditions. As a comparison, I'm also growing Raven from Renee's Seeds this year (although I've decided that after this year, I'm NEVER purchasing from that company again...) and I find them to be much more enjoyable in flavor, but lower in production - which, as I understand it, is pretty much the opposite of how things should be with Costata vs. Raven.

Garden oddities.

Well, I really liked the Costata Romanesco for flavor too, but they are not doing well in my garden (whereas the pattypan squash right next to them is flourishing). It seemed like the vines got some sort of mold on the underside, perhaps they are a little more susceptable to that sort of problem? Maybe I'll try Cocozelle or Raven next year...

We tried Costata Romanesco one year and had horrible luck with it. Although I guess technically it's not a zucchini, we like "Magda". It's a much paler green and flourishes and produces better than anything else we've tried growing. We had our first one of the season last night. So yummy!!
Edie

Found a few pics i took a month back for some of my zucchini. Just in case you try one of these. The Dark Star is best roasted on the grill with some oil. The Coco is best steamed and used in pasta dishes. And the golden is universal, and i like to use it for zucchini bread. Also, the golden ones i let get a little bigger as the seeds do not grow as big as some of the other varieties i have tried. All 3 of these varieties are distinctly different in flavor. I also grow Round French Zucchini, but i elected to grow them during my second late summer crop this year. Those are very tasty as well, and are very manageable as you pick them around the size of a baseball.

Dark Star
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Coccozella di Napoli

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Golden Zucchini

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Nice pics!

Carol Deppe also recommends Costata Romanesco. She likes the flavor & says it also dries well. Couldn't find seeds in any stores, so I plan to order it for 2012.

Here is a link that might be useful: Carol Deppe: The Resilient Gardner

I just grew probably three of the biggest Costata Romanesque Zucchinis in the world. They are almost four feet long and about nine or ten inches in diameter. They definitely weigh more than a large watermelon. They got away from me so I let them keep growing just to see how big they would get.
But my family told me not to grow them anymore, they prefer the taste of a regular zucchini like Elite. I never noticed the nutty taste they were supposed too have. However the ridges do make the slices look interesting if you slice it up, and you can still eat them when they are much bigger than a regular zucchini.
They are not very prolific and have already just about stopped producing, whereas Elite would just keep kicking them out month after month until we got sick of zucchini.
The plants are huge, one of mine is more than seven feet wide.

We really like the costata romanesca. So much, I almost feel guilty making zucchini bread out of so many of them. It is so much better than ordinary zucchini. We love it just microwaved for a couple of minutes with a patty pan and a little butter.
Also, the blossoms, combined with a few squash make a fantastic soup.

So, I'm getting ready to plan for what varieties are going in my summer garden, and I got to thinking about zucchini. After living with Costata Romanesca zukes last year, I have to say that my initial impression was dead wrong. Yes, they taste like dirt when they're small, but the beauty of them comes once they've gotten well past what I would otherwise consider to be a good size for zucchini. Last summer, after leaving several on the plant because I couldn't be bothered to pick such icky-tasting squash, I finally broke down and harvested a behemoth thinking I'd just keep it around as something funny to look at. Well, my family came over one evening and I decided to hack open one of the squash to see whether it was salvageable or not and to my surprise, the seeds were still almost nonexistent and the squash, just lightly steamed then pan fried with a little garlic and butter, was the sweetest zucchini I had ever tasted!

I'll be growing it again this year for certain, though I'm still on the lookout for a plain 'ol zucchini that produces like mad, since despite all the horror stories, I have yet to experience zuke-overload.

If you're into "sweet", Magda is a great cousa type.

I also prefer the middle eastern type zukes. more flavor and less watery. Profit is the best I have tried, but no duds in the pack. Even the greys to me have better flavor than the dark greens. Don't care much for the yellows.
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My family is really attached to the dark green, supermarket types of zucchini. Still, I persist in trying a new, non-supermarket-y variety every year in the hopes that I'll find something that'll trump what they think tastes best.

How's the production on Magda? I would really love to be inundated with fruit one of these years.

Magda has good production for me, and starts bearing early. I'm not an "all-zucchini" person, and usually plant yellow crookneck and maybe some scallops, too.

Johnny's says their "Zephyr" tastes a lot like Magda. It's a little firmer, not as productive, but very interesting and has good quality when small. Zucchinis, including Magda, usually have more "staying power" in my garden than other summer squashes. They seem to stand up to the diseases around here better.

I usually buy Magda from Willhite in Texas and share seed with friends. I tried Burpee's "Sweet Zuke" as a darker companion to it, but was a little disappointed. It breaks very easily at harvest.

If your soil is extremely sandy, you may end up with flavorless veggies. It happened to me, and no amount of compost or fertilizer would fix it. The soil map said I had 23 feet of nearly pure sand. Also, not enough sun will give you weak flavors.

I have a feeling what I like is a less flavorful zucchini, which I know sounds strange. The only ones that I've tasted that had a whole lot of flavor were, to me, very "earthy" - too earthy - which is pretty much a nice way of saying that I feel like I'm eating squash-textured clods of dirt.

I'll definitely be planting Costata again this year, and I ordered Cucuzzi just to have another vining type to keep my Tromboncino company, but I still need another bush type. Looks like Magda may be it!

Carolynnc; If you like Magda, try Freckles from Willhite. Technically a grey type, but a heavy producer.
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Thanks, Farmerdill. Pretty squash. As I recall, some of the older freckled types are very productive, too. To me, Magda seems like a tender squash. Is Freckles a little firmer, like older freckled types? Flavor similar to Magda?

Spaghetina,

I have grown Trombocino and Cucuzzi types together. Always thought they would be interesting on an overhead trellis. Neither is spiny. Don't expect the Cucuzzi to taste much like zucchini. You can either steam it very briefly when the diameter of a quarter or peel with a potato peeler, remove seeds and pith, stuff and bake "canoes" when larger. The immature white seeds are sweet and crunchy. Hope they're not poisonous.

Have you grown Trombocinos before? How do you like to prepare them?

Spaghetina,

If you are close to the coast, in the fog belt, you may want to think about varieties with more mildew resistance than I need in my climate, where heat and soil disease take a toll. Magda is sold by Johnny's in the Northeast, so it seems like a reasonable choice for you this year. If your family continues to clamor for the green supermarket type, you might look into cool weather tolerant/parthenocarpic or mildew resistant varieties. PNW catalogs like Nichols and Territorial, plus Thompson and Morgan, would be good places to look. Nichols has some unusual offerings, too.

Here is a link that might be useful: Nichols summer squashes and gourds

Based on your recommendations, I ended up buying some Magda seeds (along with Fortex beans, which I've been wanting to try for the last 3 years and am finally just getting around to picking up) from Johnny's last night. I almost bought them from Willhite, but after reading all of the horrible things people were saying about their slow shipping over at DG, I decided against it, even though the seed quantity was far greater. My impatience won out over my frugality, as is often the case.

I've grown Tromboncinos the last 2 years and have liked them well enough. They're not my favorite by any stretch of the imagination, but I like their growth habit, they produce a lot of food, and since I don't have a lot of space to grow winter squash, I let some get huge and viola - I have something to roast when it gets cold. For me, they're sort of a Jack of all trades, master of none, but still, they're good enough, and they look so darned cool hanging off my trellis.

I'm boring in my cooking preparation. When they're still tender, I cook them as I do zucchini; lightly steamed then sauteed with a little onion, garlic, and olive oil or butter until fragrant.

Once they're hardened, I usually peel, chop into 1" cubes, mix with some chopped onion, cayenne, a splash of maple syrup, garlic salt, pepper and whatever else sounds good at the time, and roast 'til most of the liquid disappears. They're much more watery than, say, a butternut, but again, they're also easier for me to grow in my tiny little space, so it's a tradeoff I'm willing to make.

I'm hoping the Magdas do well here. I moved away from a colder, foggier part of the Bay about 10 years ago, to somewhere where it gets far, far hotter in the summer months. Powdery mildew seems like what does my squash in every year, but generally not until the very end of the season when I no longer care what happens to them anyway. After reading over and over about how sweet Magdas are, I'm super excited to give them a try. I think I've discovered that "sweet" is pretty much a trait I like in everything I grow; if it's naturally sweet, it just tastes better to me.

Willhite can be slow sometimes. They seem to get caught in the California inspection bottleneck with some regularity. They're really geared to commercial growers. Nothing wrong with getting seeds from Johnny's.

Fortex is a great bean, too.

I like Trombocino sauteed with onion or garlic better than steamed. Wrong texture for steaming. I have a friend who uses the big (not ripe) ones for huge pots of vegetable soup. You can grow the smaller butternuts the same way you do Trombocino, but they're not as good for summer uses. You've made an interesting compromise. They will look even cooler on your trellis with the long, skinny cucuzzis on felted, grey-leafed plants. The white flowers bloom at night. Watch for budworms. A little Bt can help.