Hybridizers: It can be fun to breed your own zinnias - Part 5, 1 by Zen_Man

Zen_Man wrote:
Greetings to all,

Welcome to this continuing message thread. The previous part of this ongoing series, It can be fun to breed your own zinnias - Part 4, has over a hundred messages and has become rather long and slow to load, so we are continuing it here for a fresh start. If you want, you can access the Part 4 thread through this link http://davesgarden.com/community/forums/t/1136291/ and it, in turn, has a link to the part before it. As always, your participation and comments here are most welcome.

The first of my Fall crop of zinnias is starting to bloom. Several have already qualified as "culls" and will be discarded, but the attached picture shows a "toothy" specimen that caught my eye. That picture was taken yesterday.

That zinnia has a reasonable amount of toothiness, and I used that single pollen floret to self-pollinate most of the available stigmas on this bloom. I did that by using a special pair of fine point tweezers to extract the anther bundle from the floret and touch the exposed anthers to the stigmas. That is a technique I developed indoors last Winter to make choice pollen go farther. It is enabled by a special pair of tweezers that have curved fine points.

I hope to see more toothy zinnias in my Fall crop of zinnias. I intend to self them and inter-cross them in order to build up more seeds for a big plant-out of toothy zinnias next year. My hope is, that if I grow a large number of toothy zinnias, I might find some rare specimens with an extreme amount of toothiness. At the present time, I don't know far zinnias can go in the development of this subdivided petal form.

I don't have any trumpet-petaled or tubular zinnias in the pollen-bearing stage right now (they have all gone to seed and I have harvested the seed to save them from the Finches), but there are some tubular seedlings coming on in my Fall crop. If I have the opportunity, I will make some crosses between the toothys and tubulars, both ways. I would like to see the toothy trait in some tubulars, and vice versa. More later.

ZM