It can be fun to breed your own zinnias - Part 47
zen_man
6 years ago
last modified: 6 years ago
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6 years agozen_man
6 years agoRelated Discussions
It can be fun to breed your own zinnias - Part 3
Comments (40)Pls8xx, "One thing that has been on my mind the last few weeks is how important it is to me that a zinnia have a short compact plant form. I grow in a sand/clay mix rather than topsoil. It will hold plants upright fine when dry, but when wet the soil looses its strength and the tall plants become vulnerable to wind knocking them over." You have made a good case that you do need zinnias with a more compact plant habit. Last year, we had a very violent storm with high winds of 50mph and it blew down literally dozens of my zinnias. I had concrete re-bar tomato cages around a few of my more critical "breeders" and they were protected. But many of my big zinnia plants snapped off at the ground and many more lost their basal branches and some lateral branches. Interestingly, some of my big bushy scabiosa flowered zinnias and most of those F1s with a "scabi" parent came through just fine, with amazing resistance to the high winds. As is usual in a high wind storm here, for a period of hours we lost our electrical power, our telephone land line, and our cable connection. I studied the wreckage in my zinnia patch to see "what went wrong" structurally with my zinnias. As is usual for me, there were some surprises. I plan to apply what I learned from my "crash investigation" to make better decisions about plant structure this year. For one thing, I had planted a lot of Burpeeanas, from both Burpee and from Stokes. I had a lot of "out of the seed packet" Burpeeanas and some F1 hybrids from crosses that I made between Burpeeanas. (Incidentally, your picture of the "original" red Burpeeanas shows just how nice that Burpeeana bushy look can be.) To my amazement, some of the most disastrous structural failures were in my Burpeeanas. They have what I refer to as a "candelabra" stem structure, with basal branches coming out from the main stem at a 90 degree angle. Even though the stems look thick and strong, there is a kind of "joint" at the attachment point. Some of the basal branches that were in contact with the soil had actually sprouted roots and were apparently in the process of becoming independent plants. It's almost as if the stem joint was "willing" to detach from the main stem. But even higher up, those branches that cantilevered out from the main stem at a 90-degree angle seemed inherently weak. In almost all cases, the branches broke at their attachment points to the main stem. The plants that seemed resistant to branches breaking off had their branches leaving the main stem at a much more acute angle, like 45 or even 30°. So their branches were headed upward at the attachment point. For whatever reason, those branches seemed much better attached, even if the plant habit was more generally upward than outward. Despite the fragility of the Burpeeana plants in high winds, I plan to continue growing them and selecting the best flowers and plants. I will just be looking for stronger attachment points for their branches. If you want to emphasize compactness in your zinnia breeding, you can start with some strains that are already compact and cross some other zinnias with them. I personally have quit crossing the lower growing zinnias because I don't like kneeling and bending over to do my cross pollinating. I've always had a tendency toward lower back pain from my gardening, and a lot of bending over just aggravates it. However, short zinnias are interesting looking and fascinating in crosses, so I am thinking about constructing some really high raised beds that might bring those short zinnias up to a more comfortable working distance. There are some short zinnias that you can cross with tall zinnias that will produce some intermediate compact F1 hybrids, and the F2s from them should sort out into a wide range of plants that you could pick from for further breeding. Three of the shortest are the Thumbelina zinnia, the Zinnita zinnia, and Zinnia Short Stuff. Here is another view of Short Stuff and here is another seed source: Short Stuff at New England seed. Some taller but still very compact zinnias are Zinnia Swizzle cherry and ivory, Zinnia Swizzle scarlet and yellow, Zinnia Dreamland hybrids, Zinnia Magellan mix, and I just found that Zinnia Peter Pan mix is apparently still available. By crossing some of those compact zinnias with other zinnias you should have the basis for creating several new strains of compact zinnias, with various degrees of compactness. MM...See MoreIt can be fun to breed your own zinnias - Part 48
Comments (109)Hi Ninecrow, Yeah, yeah, I know. I created Part 49, but Houzz lost it somehow. I have a Trouble Report in with them, but so far the only response is an automatic "we got your message" response. This was caused by a bug in the Houzz software, and I am not impressed that after 24 hours from reporting the problem, I still have not communicated with a Houzz human being. It will eventually get resolved, and there will be a Part 49. Oddly, the Link that doesn't work for you does work for me. But that is the only way I can access the new Part 49. I may just be accessing it in a local browser buffer. It doesn't show up in the Annuals message list or the Hybridizing message list (which I tagged for Part 49 because multiple forums for a message string is a feature of the new software). Unfortunately, using that feature led to the disappearance of the new Part 49. If I had not chosen to use the new feature, Part 49 would already be there for us. We shall see what we shall see. ZM...See MoreIt can be fun to breed your own zinnias - Part 49
Comments (102)Hello everyone, Well, we did get that expected rain. It came with some winds, but I don't see any obvious wind damage. It is now comfortably cool outside, but very wet. I will shuck zinnia seeds indoors until things dry off a bit. This is one of those current narrow petaled specimens.The tubes are light colored, but unfortunately not white. This is a closer look at some of the petal ends.There is actually quite a bit of variation in the end-of-petal "flare". That suggests that the flares may be partially developmental rather than genetic. The embryo inside the green seed at the base of each petal would be genetically different if it had been fertilized by a pollen grain, either from this plant or from a different one, because it would have been produced by the cellular process known as meiosis, which recombines the genes. In the more likely probability that the embryos are not fertilized at this stage, the cells in the petal flares are produced by mitosis and are genetically the same as the cells in other parts of the bloom, so the variations in the petal-end flares would be developmental and not genetic. Which raises questions as to which of the many variations we see in zinnias are developmental and not genetic. At some time during the coming Winter I hope to purchase a stereo microscope with a camera mount, so that I can take micro-photographs of some of my indoor zinnias. It will not be capable of seeing chromosomes (that takes a serious high-power laboratory grade microscope), but it will hopefully be capable of seeing details like leaf stomata or leaf hairs, from which you can hopefully deduce whether the plant is diploid or tetraploid. That is because I want to develop the capability of producing some triploid zinnias, and to do that it is almost a requirement that I be able to determine the "ploidy" of a zinnia by observation. And the microscope will let me study and photograph my zinnias in more detail. I continue to see little creatures that I refer to as "micro insects". I am curious about them. More later. Namaste. ZM...See MoreIt can be fun to breed your own zinnias - Part 51
Comments (146)OK this is good stuff ZM. I was at first blush ignoring features, instead focusing on learning mechanisms,,BUT as you wisely allude, they are one in the same, to wit: the cone IS the floret factory. And while I am aesthetically SO not a conehead fan (at least at this hour), it is so very helpful to understand that this despisable (to me) "tumor" on top of this delicate flower is indeed part of the whole operation. OK OK learning slow but sure. So now I can emesh some aesthetic thinking in my mechanical procedures. On that score, this very morning, my first breached green seed sprouted (seven days and nights I've been sweating), but doggone it I believe it is happening. I've got two rows of breach tests going on, one barely nicked, and two days ago a much more agressive scalping to see if I observe germination differernces. My first hybrid attemp is in day 17 of finished pollinating, will hold off another week to ten days to start pulling./breaching/planting seeds. Woo hoo, more fun than a barrel of politicians. John, appreciatively Low mountains Veracruz PS The colored petals in your foto are indeed gorgeous, undeniably. I also think that Zowie thing is particularly disgusting, but that's just me....See MoreS I
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