Hello friends,

Last spring I sowed all the remaining Floret Zinnia seeds I had in storage, which I had bought from Emerden in 2024. The Floret Previous Metals, Dawn Creek Blush, and Unicorn zinnia varieties were sown into seed raising mix, grown on until they had two sets of true leaves, and then they were potted up into bigger containers with potting mix until I was sure the risk of frost was over.

I planted them in two vegetable garden beds close together, so that I could easily save seed for my own personal stash for the coming years.

And then it was time to wait for them to flower. Due to our horrible summer, which wasn't really a summer, my zinnia plants didn't begin to start flowering until late January, but they were well worth the wait. I had hundreds of flowers in such gorgeous colours ranging from cream, pinks, and orange, all the way to bright red. The range of zinnia flower types flowering varied from singles, to cactus shapes, all the way through to frilly doubles.

Dawns Creek Blush flowers varied from dusky pinks, to pinks, and to purples.

Precious Metals gave me lots of metallics in shades of orange, pinks and purples, and there was even ombré colouring in some of the flowers.

And finally, the Floret Unicorn variety gave me florescent bright pinks and orange and red flowers, with a lot of double flowers amongst them.

I was so happy with my zinnia patch, and I wasn't the only one. Bees and butterflies swarmed over my zinnias all summer and autumn long, and that made it just it that much better in my opinion.

I shared my Floret zinnias on social media, and soon found myself becoming a very small scale flower farmer, as I provided buckets of zinnias to a local flower farmer florist. I very much enjoyed going out into my garden on summer mornings to fill up buckets of zinnias to send away to their new homes.

Unfortunately though thanks to the terrible summer we had, all too soon I had to start seed saving by letting the blooming flowers set seed and turn brown. I managed to save seed from a lot of mature flowers, before the looming threat of a decent frost forced me to save as many older flowers (but not quite mature flowers) in mid-April.

On the 22nd of April we had our first proper frost, and all my lovely zinnias sparkled in the cold autumn sunrise as frost coated them all. By the afternoon the zinnia plants had all turned brown and died.

And so the zinnia season for 2025/2026 has come to an end. I have 5 trays of zinnia flower heads to process over the winter, so I can harvest the seed and store it away until next spring. I am very much looking forward to seeing which zinnia flowers bloom next summer. Zinnias are known to have complex and highly plastic genomes, and have transposons, aka jumping genes, which can lead to unstable genetics, so who knows what I'll end up with. But I'm excited to find out...

Have a wonderful day

Julie-Ann

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Tags: 2025, 2026, Floret, Floret Flower Farm, Flowering, Flowers, Garden, Gardening, Spring, Summer, Zinnia, Zinnias