Annuals: ZINNIAS! 2011 June to whenever!, 1 by Zen_Man

Zen_Man wrote:
BB,

"This year however gardening has been a royal travesty. All the rain, just late planting and just downright no fun."

It was a pretty good year for me, except for an extended period of drought. I had to water my zinnias several times just to keep them alive. I did get some interesting new zinnias, so I did have fun cross pollinating them. That lets you play match-maker among your zinnias, deciding which ones should be crossed with which ones.

"My profusions are getting large and spreading. I am soo very happy with them."

I'm glad you had good performance from your Profusions, and I see that you developed a good technique for getting a lot of seeds from them. I look forward to some pictures of your zinnias next year.

Although I have been shucking a number of brown seedheads, I also saved a lot of zinnia seeds at the greenseed stage and dried them out prior to packaging them. The larger zinnias have larger seeds and larger petals, and you can pluck out those petals individually and either plant them for a quick second generation or dry them to package them for use later.

I did get one zinnia specimen this year that had an unusual spreading shrub-like plant. It was over five feet across in some directions. Completely un-zinnia-like. I saved both green seeds and brown heads from it. I crossed it with several other unusual zinnia specimens, and I can hardly wait to see if that shrub-like trait is transmitted to any of the progeny.

ZM