[metmom]

Buy seeds that are 'indeterminate', so that you will have food growing and harvesting during the entire growing season, or just grow 5 Zucchinis plants.

For seeds, staggering the plantings will also give a continuous harvest.

And for a more sure food supply, look for heirloom varieties or what is known as open pollinated, so you can save the seeds.

Hybrids either don’t produce viable seeds or they revert back to the parent plant, which may not be what works best for you.

Some crops are also less prone to being bothered by vermin of all kinds.

Try growing those instead and look into container gardening stuff more likely to be eaten by rabbits or wood chucks.

One means I found rather effective to protecting plants from being munched on is to put a tomato cage over them and then wrap a piece of chicken wire around it to make individual cages. I also scavenged an old bird cage someone had in their trash pile and figured if I took the bottom of it out, I could put it over the plants and anchor it down for pest control. I will be trying that this year.

[Ellendra]

Hybrids either don’t produce viable seeds or they revert back to the parent plant, which may not be what works best for you.

The majority of hybrids produce viable seeds, but the plants that grow from those seeds will have some unpredictable combination of traits from the grandparent plants. Some will be better that the first-generation hybrid, some will be worse, some will be nearly identical, and some will be similar in quality but with different traits than the original.

If you continue to save seeds every year from the plants you like best, eventually those traits should stabilize. This is where new varieties come from.