Hybrid seeds grow fine the next year. My wife handles the zucchini in the the family we each have our talents mine is tomatoes and peppers, eggplant and cucumbers. Anyway, she lets a zucchini grow to the size of a baseball bat and harvests the seeds. My wife is a big believer in saving seeds. I guarantee that hybrid seeds are not only fertile but produce very good offspring the next year. We have been doing this for years. The plants are vigorous and pretty true to form for example a white zucchini this year is a white zucchini next season too. Sure the genetics can be a little different but nothing you would notice at the dinner table. As for the plants, opinions vary. You can till them under. But I pull them up and put them in the compost heap they rot faster. Otherwise in the spring you are digging up zucchini stalks they are very fibrous and I find they rot a lot better in the compost heap than in a garden bed. Plant winter rye grass where the zucchini was it is a cheap "green manure". Just my opinion, I welcome other opinions.

Thanks very much for the tips. I went out and gave the Foxgloves a closer inspection yesterday. I started cutting off all the dead stuff... lots of totally brown leaves and stems. But as I looked more closely I noticed something had been eating the leaves ... they looked almost "perforated". One of the plants was dead all the way to the ground, so i pulled it up and discarded it. But the other three have some (seemingly fresh) green growth near the bottom. I'm thinking the eaten leaves might be what killed off the other plant, and most of the remaining three. I'm not sure what it was, so after trimming the dead stuff, I sprayed the green leaves with some insecticide soap. Thanks all, for your feedback! p.s. I planned them in probably June or so, and they did flower nicely (actually were flowering when i planted them). When those blooms finished, i snipped them off, and they bloomed again later, in the late summer/early Fall. Hopefully they'll come back and do the same again this summer :)

snow is irrelevant, except in the sense of crushing a plant ... water accumulation in the problem .. and i dont recall what your potting media is ... it should NOT be a high peat mix ... peat holds too much water ... sometimes you can find STRAW .. not hay ... after Halloween for the taking ... hay is animal food .. and has seeds .. which can be a nightmare if you use it in the garden next year ... straw is the bottom part.. and has 99% less seed .... but free is free ... but i dont know what salt marsh hay is ... i would just get 4 ... make a square.. and put the pots inside ... do NOT leave the pot edge in the sun ... make sure it is all shaded ... the pots can go in the ground now if you want.. no need to wait until late fall when the ground is not workable.. as soon as you remove whatever is there.. just stick the pots in ... another option.. is to collect some larger pots .... fill bottom with bark or course mulch.. then insert pots ... and fill edges with same .... so that the interior pot stays cold .... and if you buy some bark fines.. you can use that next year .. to make a better potting media for trees/conifers ... it SEEMS .... you are ignoring the potting media as an issue ... either you fully understand what we are talking about [will mentions it] .. or you are not understanding how important it is ... if you are using a very high peat .. perennial mix.. you might want to repot them NOW.. to insure drainage ... now .. in my z5 .... is a perfect time to be bare rooting and planting trees .. ken

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