Hybridizers: It can be fun to breed your own zinnias - Part 2, 1 by Zen_Man

Zen_Man wrote:
Lucy,

"You might infect some of them with the zinnia virus."

That is a possibility. Our electric meter reader lady commented to me about my pink-and-white zinnia that she could see through our window as she was reading our meter. She was interested when I told her that breeding zinnias was a hobby of mine. A picture of a bloom on that plant was included with my message on February 22, 2009 11:28 PM. Two of my plant stands are on the south windows of this house and are visible through the venetian blinds, which I usually keep partially open to let the sunlight in to complement my fluorescent lights. Our electric meter is near those windows.

Zinnias make much better plants if you pinch out the central bud before it develops into a flower, and the plants become branchier yet if you pinch some of the buds on the lateral branches. The more you delay flowering, the more time the plant has to develop larger and with better structure. However, I am always in a hurry to pollinate and mature some seeds to get an early start on the next generation, so I forgo the benefits of pinching in order to get rapid development of plantable hybridized green seeds.

This picture shows such a breeder in which the central bud has matured enough to have plantable green seeds and a lateral branch has produced a bloom that I am now using for breeding. I like the bushy, frilly flower form on this breeder, as well as the compact plant. The plant is compact, partly because it quickly started developing that first big bloom, and partly because I treated it with a plant growth regulator. I didn't use a lot of plant growth regulator on it, so genetics may play a role in the plant structure. Both of its flowers are fairly large, as you can see from the scale of the 10-inch square pot that the zinnia is growing in.

ZM