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

Zen_Man wrote:
Hi Keith,

You are right that you can find new zinnia varieties using the technique you describe, which involves very little work. And you can actually make a lot of progress by simply saving seeds from your favorite zinnias every year. But, if you are so inclined, you can go deeper into the hobby, if your curiosity about zinnias leads you there.

Over in the Annuals forum, in the "Annuals: zinnia problem" message thread, I told Brenda about the green seed technique for saving zinnia seeds as a means of minimizing the risk of water damage and bird damage to the seeds in the zinnia flower heads. I mentioned that another implication of the green seed technique is that it opens up the possibility of starting a second generation of zinnias while the first generation is still growing. I told Brenda that I would go into that in more detail in a subsequent message. I think I will do that here in this Hybridizer's forum, and refer Brenda over here, because it has applicability here and the Hybridizer's forum is one of Dave's Garden's forums that is open to outsiders without requiring them to become members of Dave's Garden. It would be good if we could widen our circle of people interested in growing zinnias.

I originally experimented with planting green zinnia seeds as a means of getting a quick second generation of zinnias. It was another zinnia breeder (Jackie R over in GardenWeb) who informed me that I could dry my green seeds for storage and later use, because she had been doing that for quite some time. I started doing that myself, because saving green zinnia seeds has several advantages.

When you are trying to get a quick second generation of zinnias, you are in a hurry to get the green seeds to germinate. Drying them takes time and if you plant them immediately after pulling them from a zinnia flower head, they don't germinate immediately because the green seed coat is alive and impermeable to water. When a green seed is planted, the seed coat has to die and become permeable to water before the green seed germinates. That can take two or three weeks, which significantly delays getting that second generation of zinnias. But if you breach the seed coat in some way, water can get immediate access to the embryo and cause prompt germination in two to four days. Several ways of doing that are shown in the accompanying picture.

Notice the "nearly naked" embryo in that picture. At first that was sort of an accident, but I discovered that while you are opening the seed coat, it isn't hard to go on and extract the embryo altogether. That was how the technique of growing zinnias from embryos instead of seeds evolved. That technique was illustrated in a message above.

I have a bunch of zinnias growing right now beside my computer that were started from green seeds and embryos that were harvested from selected specimens before our killing frost. That third generation of zinnias this year is budding out, with the potential of starting a fourth generation of zinnias before Christmas.

Because you extract green seeds from a growing zinnia flower head, the green seed technique lets you get a second generation of zinnias growing and developing while the parent mother zinnia plant is still growing and developing. That's a little bit reminiscent of a mother hen with her baby chicks.

ZM