Hybridizers: It can be fun to breed your own zinnias - Part 3, 1 by Zen_Man

Zen_Man wrote:
Lucy,

"Sorry I like the first one better--this form reminds me too much of coneflowers"

Me too. But I like to have a diversity of flower forms. Echinaceamaniac likes coneflowers, and some of my zinnias are "Echinacea flowered". I saved seeds from this specimen because the flower was a little different from anything I had seen before in zinnias. Zinnias have a lot of variation, and some of its progeny might look better.

"I'm sure that they are begging to come inside."

I have been bringing them inside, in the form of cuttings. Four years ago, in my Maine garden, I dug up a few choice breeders and brought them inside in big pots, to save them from impending frosts. I brought a lot of problems inside when I did that. Aphids, which were a minor problem outside, had a population explosion inside. The plants also came in with a bunch of Lady Bugs and their larva, and they ate a lot of aphids, but the aphids were multiplying so rapidly that the Lady Bugs couldn't "make a dent" in their population.

I tried to help control the aphids by sucking them up in one of those little vacuum cleaners for computer keyboards. But aphids hid between the petals of flowers, and in the center parts of of the blooms as well, and soon I could see that neither I nor the Lady Bugs could control them. It was a losing game that was over in a little over a month. I did harvest some good seeds from those plants though, which were my first good scabiosa hybrids. They really amazed me, and sold me on the idea of including scabiosa flowered zinnias in my project. So, in a sense, the battle was worth it.

But I don't intend to dig up any more zinnia plants and bring them inside. It's like bringing a Trojan Horse inside. Instead, I am using cuttings, which can be sterilized in Physan 20, to avoid bringing in any unwanted passengers. As an experiment, I purchased some 3-inch "clear" orchid pots that I could try out for my cuttings, so that I could look through the sides of the pot to see if enough roots had formed to repot the cutting. You can't see them very well in this picture, but I could see several roots to verify that this zinnia cutting was ready to re-pot.

ZM