DavidLMO said:Can you flesh out what you mean by " I usually get two generations of zinnias indoors "?
Sure. The seedlings that are now growing indoors under fluorescent lights will be blooming indoors in early January. I will discard the ones that I don't like and self or cross-pollinate the ones that I do like, and I will have green seeds in February that contain fully developed embryos.
Rather than follow the usual route of waiting for the seedheads to die and turn brown, I will harvest those green seeds and plant them. They will come up in a few days and be blooming in early April. Those second generation zinnias will provide green seeds that I can plant outside in late April and early May.
Thus the progeny from my second generation indoor zinnias will become the first generation of of my 2016 outdoor zinnias. Their first blooms will be appearing in June, in time to create a second outdoor generation.
I joke that maybe someday I will breed a carnivorous zinnia, but actually I sort of already did. This zinnia bloom had petals that were tubular and they did catch rain water and hold it for over a week. Zinnias, like most plants, can be foliar fed, by spraying soluble nutrients on them. Plants can absorb soluble nutrients through their leaves, and also through the petals on their blooms. Some small insects (they looked a bit like winged aphids) did drown in the water in those petal-cups and decay, and small amounts of nutrients most probably were absorbed by the petal cups. So that zinnia most probably did derive some nutrition from trapped insects, albeit a small amount, and technically could be considered carnivorous (insectivorous).
The petals on that zinnia reminded me a bit of a Pitcher Plant. I have had many zinnias that had tubular petals, and I tend to encourage that. Tubular petals can be rather attractive.
And I suppose that a lot of the tubular petaled zinnias have the potential to be insectivorous if the conditions are right. Some tubular petaled zinnias have rather small openings in their petals, and may not catch any rainwater.
I anticipate seeing some new zinnia flower forms indoors this Winter.
ZM
