Hybridizers: It can be fun to breed your own zinnias - Part 6, 5 by Zen_Man

Zen_Man wrote:
[quote=\"brendak654\"]ZM - I have not heard much out of you lately. Actually I had trouble finding this thread. I know you must have some wonderful zinnia blooms to share...

I\'ve just came in from my zinnia patches and these are the best of the best blossoms that I have right now from hybridizing and saved seeds...

I\'m already excited about some of the sizes of my this years zinnia. The larger ones fascinate me and I\'ll definitely use them for hybridizing...
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Hi Brenda,

I have been busy planting zinnias and chopping weeds. Our native grasses really try to take over. I have been doing succession planting and multi-tasking, so only a few of my zinnias are in bloom yet. I agree with you about big flower size being desirable. Many of my \"exotic\" zinnias tend to be a bit small, so I cross them with larger zinnias, hoping that recombination can keep the exotic look while making the bloom bigger.

The zinnias in your first, third, and fourth pictures have good uproll on their petals, which makes them good breeders. Your second picture has good size and petal form and something a bit different with its center. The zinnia in your last photo has great multicolor pastel blending and big size. Hopefully it will produce a lot of blooms and a lot of selfed seeds towards establishing it as a strain. It could produce variations on itself that would be equally desirable.

Your fourth zinnia shows that single zinnias can look good, and it has nicely \"toothed\" petal ends.I am getting toothed petal ends from a variety of sources, including crosses between my Razzle Dazzles and conventional zinnias. I saw a rain storm moving in this afternoon, so I hurriedly snapped a few photos before the storm hit. In my haste I accidentally got my camera set for day-date tagging, which I didn\'t intend to do. But at least the tags are accurate. I don\'t plan to do that on future pictures.

The winds from the storm were bobbing my zinnias around, and I tried to steady them with my left hand while holding the camera with my right hand. My thumb may show in some of those pictures.in today\'s series. The storm looked threatening, but yielded very little actual rain. The weathermen predict that we will get some heavy rains in the next few days. There might even be some rain on the Fourth. More later.

ZM