Jai_Ganesha said:Why would you actually need a 10" pot? If a zinnia is a keeper by the time you'd need a 10" pot you'd already have ample seeds saved, no?
Hi Jack,
I probably won't need a 10-inch pot this year. I didn't last year, or several years before. But if a zinnia is
really a good keeper, there isn't any such thing as too many seeds.
There is a zinnia genetic factor that is fairly unusual that has bearing on this. Early on in my crosses between scabiosa flowered zinnias and "other" zinnias, I got an unusual zinnia bush that seemed to have unlimited power to put out new branches with new blooms, even though it already had
dozens of mature seedheads from which I could save seeds. That zinnia plant became a huge tumble-weed-like shrub before a killing frost stopped its production of new blooms. At that time it had several hundred blooms in various stages of development -- a couple of orders of magnitude more than what is normal.
Unfortunately its seed production got destroyed in a freak failure of the wine cooler I was storing my zinnia seeds in while we lived in Maine. The cooler, which was like a small refrigerator, shorted out somehow and "cooked" all of my zinnia seeds. I hope to get a more reliable way to store zinnia seeds longtime, but for the time being, and in recent years, my seed storage is room temperature.
That scabious hybrid did show one of the things that "zinnias can do". I hope to see a recurrence of that genetic recombination. It is debatable whether that feature is a good thing or not. That plant was covered with maybe 75% dead brown seed-heads and 25% young new seedheads and that wasn't really attractive. But if I do get a recurrence of that "fountain of youth" genetic combination, I will use a 10-inch pot to extend its development. And maybe even a larger container.
And I am shopping around for a thermoelectric cooler to hopefully provide safe cool storage for zinnia seeds. Several such "no moving parts" coolers are available. If we had room in our kitchen refrigerator, I would use it, but the fridge is usually overloaded with various food items. And I have zinnia seeds from several years in the past. I do need dedicated storage.
ZM
