Propagation: Are Candy Mix Zinnia seeds hybrid?, 1 by Zen_Man

Zen_Man wrote:
Hi Dotty & Corey,

I know this is an old thread, but I just happened on it. Corey, I think Harris Seeds is mistaken in listing Candy Mix as an F1 hybrid. Other seed companies, such as Parks, don't list it as a hybrid. I think the cost of the seeds, on a cents-per-seed basis, would be considerably higher if Candy Mix were an F1 hybrid.

http://parkseed.com/zinnia-candy-mix/p/51989-PK-P1/

I have grown Candy Mix and saved seeds from them. A lot of the Candy Mix seeds do not even "come true" right out of the commercial seed packet. The Parks picture shows a single specimen, with other singles out-of-focus in the background.

The scabious flower form of Candy Mix and other Scabiosa Flowered zinnia strains is not very stable. I enjoy crossing scabious flowered zinnias with other zinnia strains, and I get some interesting results that way. I also get a lot of off-type single zinnias that I don't like, so I just pull those out or, if they are too close to a nearby good zinnia, I just use hand pruners to snip the culled zinnias off at ground level, so that I can remove them. That way the roots of the "good" zinnias aren't disturbed. By saving seeds from your best Candy Mix zinnias, you can probably improve on the commercial strain.

The zinnias in the picture came from a hybrid involving Candy Mix and a larger zinnia. The advantage of crossing zinnias like Candy Mix with giant flowered zinnias is that you can get larger versions of the scabious flower form that you can't get in a commercial seed packet.

Incidentally, Dotty, the Candy Mix zinnia in your picture looks like a good one. I hope you will grow Candy Mix again this year. I plan to grow more of them, to get a greater variety of that zinnia flower form in my gene pool.

ZM