Argo wrote:

This year I tried something new with my zuccini plantings. A couple of
years ago, my mother showed me where she had planted beets, beans, and
chard on the top of her compost heap. They grew like mad. So, I
thought, "What a great idea" and this spring, I planted three zuccini
seedlings on the top of last year's (and this spring's) compost heap.

Amazingly, all three plants grew well and produced well. Why was this
amazing? It turns out that my mother had planted her crops on a mature
compost pile, not one with green compost on top.......................

You can get away with that with things like zucchini, pumpkins and other
squash. I do it all the time. As you see in my other post, I did it this
year with zucchini, as you did.
I have sometimes had trouble with the plants getting dry and wilting,
especially when they are still young. Over come this by pulling back the
dryer surface layers and planting into the moist, nearly finished
compost down deeper. This will be like planting down in a hole but the
plants will soon be so big that it's not noticeable. There is another
thing I have done if it is a very long way down to either finished
compost or the old soil at the bottom of the pile. I'll pull back the
unfinished compost to expose an area of 18 inches or so of soil. I'll
shovel in a few scoops of soil from elsewhere and plant it that. The
roots will still dig into and under the compost pile and grow a nice big
plant that uses the otherwise wasted space of the compost pile. I like it.

Steve