Hybridizers: It can be fun to breed your own zinnias - Part 6, 1 by Zen_Man

Zen_Man wrote:
Hi Brenda,

A few years ago I had a zinnia that had Aster Yellows. At first I thought it was a genetic mutation, and I was going to save seeds from it and cross it with other zinnias. But as far as I could determine it had no viable pollen or stigmas, so I did some Internet searching and found someone with an Echinacea that had a very similar bloom. And it was diagnosed as Aster Yellows.

So I treated my weird zinnia (it had another fairly large zinnia plant growing out of its main bloom) as a "biohazard", pulled it up carefully with plastic grocery bags on my hands (I didn't have disposable rubber gloves available then -- I do now) and put it in a trash bag (along with the grocery bags) for transport to our local landfill. I have been on the lookout for a recurrence of Aster Yellows in my zinnias ever since. So far, so good, and you might also be as lucky. I expect that you and I will not experience an Aster Yellows outbreak in our zinnias, but we should be alert to the possible occurrence of affected zinnias that need to be "quarantined" and carefully discarded.

The plant with Aster Yellows will have the phytoplasma distributed throughout its system, including apparently unaffected parts and its roots. So all parts of the plant should be discarded. They (the experts) normally do not recommend spraying for the Aster Leafhopper, since it is not usually numerous and there are many leafhoppers present that are not of that species and hence not vectors of the disease.

I did have a "scare" the year after my initial encounter with Aster Yellows, with a very remarkable zinnia that had a condition called Fasciation. The zinnia bloom was distorted into a fan shape and looked very odd, like some varieties of Celosia called "Cockscomb". Apparently fasciation is not Aster Yellows. You can find out more about fasciation at this link.

[HYPERLINK@en.wikipedia.org]

I still see a case of fasciation from time to time, and instances of "broken" bloom centers, and I consider them as defects and do not use their pollen or pollinate them. I usually pull up the fasciated zinnias and discard them in the trash. All of my zinnia discards go in the trash bound for the landfill rather than put them in a compost pile. In years past I made compost piles with zinnia plants and paid the price with compost that was loaded with zinnia diseases.

I will "toss in" a few pictures of some of my current novel zinnias. More later.

ZM