Zinnias

Last year I bought a packet of zinnia "Queen Lime Red" seeds. They were not cheap. There were supposed to be 25 seeds in the packet, although I think it was a few short. Anyway, I started them in the greenhouse in spring, and although they didn't all germinate, I ended up with 5 plants to put into the garden. They went into the ground on 7th January, and started flowing towards the end of January.

Here's how they look today:

I'm hoping some of these flowers will set seeds before the cooler weather sets in.

You might notice that the plant on the left above has no "lime" petals. Apart from that, these three plants have the sort of flowers I was expecting.

The other two, not quite!

This one has lots of flowers, but the plant is quite spindly and has few leaves. The flowers are more of a single form:

And this one is closer to orange:

It is also a rather spindly plant, and has only had the two flowers you can see in the photo.

So any seeds I do manage to get from the plants I like, may have been fertilised by either of the last two and thus may produce flowers not at all like Queen Lime Red. It is a bit frustrating because I was hoping to gather plenty of seeds this year, and have more plants next year, rather than paying an exorbitant amount for a small number of seeds as I did this time.