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

Zen_Man wrote:
Hi Robin,

" Have you saved seeds from this? If you have will you trade for something on my have list? "

I saved a limited amount of seed from the specimen you indicated, but I will be using all of them next year in an attempt to improve the strain.

My breeder specimens of zinnias are fairly heterogeneous, meaning that they have a variety of different grandparents and great grandparents. The picture on the left is another bloom on the "pagoda" zinnia you indicated. It was packed with numerous cactus-style petals, much more so than ordinary.

To show how much difference there can be between one generation of zinnias and the next, the picture on the right was the mother of that "pagoda" zinnia. I referred to the mother as my "Pink Shaggy Dog", and considered it to be an important breeder zinnia because it had such long hanging-down petals. If those petals had been pointing more or less straight out, as the petals do on a lot of zinnias, that zinnia could have been more than 8 inches across. So I consider the genes coming from the Pink Shaggy Dog to be potentially useful for one of my goals, namely a new strain of zinnias with huge blooms. That's not my only goal, but it is one of them.

I anticipate that for at least the next year or two I will not be sharing, trading, or selling seeds from any of my breeder zinnias. I will be growing all of them myself in my quest for strains of novel new zinnia varieties. My basic breeding methods are rather simple: make a lot of crosses, grow a lot of zinnias, watch for mutations, and use only the best of those to produce seeds for the next generation.

ZM


This message was edited Nov 18, 2013 9:59 PM