NP,

Well.....we live & learn !
Ottawa KS.
I pictured you in Ontario Canada, up to your nose in snow !
Zen, thanks for the information on vase life of zinnia. Love reading articles like that.
Around here this will be the case soon rather than later !

katesflowers said:

That would make a beautiful painting, I can picture that hanging on a wall here in fact!

Nancy !
You have my permission to paint that image.
Looking forward to seeing the finished work.

Not ready for that!

Hello,

I'm growing my zinnias indoors and noticed this morning this critter in the photos. Aphid? The 2nd photo is for perspective. I had aphids last year but they were dark colored. I looked this image up and it identified an aphid. Possibly root aphid. Last year's problem was before our first frost so I was ok with tossing the cuttings I had and starting over. It's past that time this year.

Any way to save these plants? I have heard neem oil may help.

Also, I was pretty careful to check the cuttings before bringing them into my grow room. I used potting soul purchased last year that was in a tote with little ventilation. Could this be an issue?

Hello ZinniaLove,

You do have an aphid problem. I don't use Neem Oil for anything, because I am not an organic gardener. Organic gardeners use Neem Oil for pretty much everything.

I use Bayer systemic products because they enter my zinnia's sap stream and won't wash off in the rain or indoors. The product I would use for this problem, and a wide range of zinnia problems, is Bayer's BioAdvanced 3-In-1 Insect, Disease and Mite Control. You can purchase it locally or from an online source, like Amazon. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000RUJZS6/
Obviously, you should not use a systemic product on anything you plan to eat, like a vegetable.

ZM (not associated with any product or vendor mentioned or linked)

I am not an organic gardener, especially indoors and will buy this product now. I appreciate your your response and so quickly!

Just know that if you bring that plant outdoors, it will be poisonous to pollinators and to the birds that eat insects that feed on plants treated with systemic pesticides.

A collage mix of zinnias grown from seed. Adore zinnias they grow all summer thru the highest heat temps and even the lil tiny flowers in the seed heads continues to open until a hard frost takes them out.
Zinnias are a favorite annual in almost any zone.

katesflowers said: Fall weather is in full swing here. Zinnia blooms are not worth gathering, since they wilt within 1 day in a vase. But they are still nice to have in the garden. Plants are now higher than me (5'3").

Overall, I'd say the zinnia were the garden champions again this year.
Thank you, Keith, for sharing the special striped zinnia seeds. Very nice blooms.

Beautiful Kate! That's a pollinators heaven right there 🦋🐝

ZenMan said: Hello Jill,

This Winter I am growing and pollinating zinnias indoors in our basement utility room. I am looking for variations of the tubular flower form.



I am making crosses between tubular and non-tubular specimens in order to coax the genetics to come up with some new stuff. I planted some seeds from those crosses today and will continue those operations this Winter and early Spring. I am having fun with my zinnias. Nothing commercial is planned. This is just a hobby for me, for fun and not for profit.

ZM

I know you said it's just a hobby and I respect that but if you ever do decide to make some commercially available I would highly recommend looking into Floret. She has been working at some gorgeous pastel zinnias for the past 5 or 6 yrs and plans to release them for sale January or February 2024.
Some she bred herself and some she acquired seeds from Dawn Creek.
She is great for working with the small grower or homeowner and I'm pretty sure she'd be thrilled to work with something like you have.
Just throwing it out there in case u ever decide to consider making it available for other people to grow as well. I fully understand the relaxing hobby part of it so I'm not trying to pressure you into it. I just know there are tons of people who would enjoy the beauty you have in your garden 😀 I love all your photos and quietly follow along!
Maybe someday I'll be able to create a cross as beautiful as what you have.

ZenMan said: Hi Loretta,

"What are your goals at this point besides the Razzle Dazzle type?"

My short-term goal is I want to improve my indoor zinnia growing techniques. I am not eliminating the "onion-flowered" forms from consideration.

A longer-term goal is I want to learn to propagate zinnias using Tissue Culture. My first experiments with that failed. Tissue Culture may be impossible for me because I would have to convert my basement utility room into a Clean Room and right now I have no idea how I would do that. There are two window wells that open to the outside, for ventilation and safe escape in case of a fire, but those are probable sources of cleanroom contamination. I may consider my Study for conversion to a cleanroom (upstairs where I am now, with my books and my computer.) I dunno.

I want to increase the bloom size of most of my new zinnia bloom forms. And I want to make significant improvements to the zinnia plants themselves. Continued cross-pollination may produce new forms in both.

But right now I am concentrating on my indoor growing techniques. I have a lot of room for improvement there.

ZM

ZM have you ever watched the YouTube channel Plants In Jars? She shows how to do tissue culturing at home. Worth the watch and she keeps it simple to understand. She does have a real set up but shows how to do it on the cheap with a homemade set up as well.

I'm finally catching up after a crazy busy year!

I know, Keith, polinator heaven was one of my goals.
Sometimes I just bring a chair out to the garden and sit between the rows. It's a city of industry quietly buzzing.
That's not all.

We have 33 acres. Eleven acres are dedicated to open meadow, especially for beneficial insects. I have encouraged milkweed to multiply out there, too. The past few years in late summer/early fall, I see a constant southeast flow of Monarch butterflies through my annual garden and the back field. Could the migrating butterflies use my flowers as a rest stop?
Oh ! I hope so.

Good morning, is there a way to search a topic or keyword in just this thread rather through all the garden.org forums?

I haven't had good luck with that kind of search but one way I try to find something by changing how many items per page show in the settings. Click on your avatar and under preferences, scroll down until you see this. You can change amount of posts you see. Choosing a high number reduces the pages in a thread and makes the search more simple.



Otherwise, I haven't had much success trying to find specifics. I would love to hear someone else's idea.

Yep, I always just do it the same way as Loretta. So far, I haven't found a better solution.

Hi guys,
There is a Search facility on most, if not all, of the forum pages here. For example, on this page, go up to the top where it says
"Annuals forum > It can be fun to breed your own zinnias" and look to the right where it says "Search Garden.org ..." with a little magnifying glass and you can enter a Search term in that field. Enter a Search term
and hit Enter to invoke your search. You can also do Google searches here.

ZM

Hey ZM,

I believe that @ZinniaLove is aware of that, but what they wanted was a way to search this thread specifically. Not the whole site.

Hi again,

" but what they wanted was a way to search this thread specifically. Not the whole site. "

Oh. Gotcha. I know how to confine a search to a specific forum, like for example this Annuals forum, but right offhand I don't know how to limit a Search to a specific thread. There probably is a way, but maybe not a convenient way.

ZM