The Zinnia Seed Experiment
Dried Zinnia Flower Heads
Zinnias are one of my favorite cutting flowers for making bouquets. They are also a favorite among nature and our friends that bring beauty and wonderment to nature such as the Butterfly and one of my all-time favorite creatures (also one of my spirit animals), the Hummingbird! I cannot tell you how much joy it brings me when I come out to clip some flowers only to discover a visiting Butterfly or Hummingbird. I could stand for hours or minutes for their visits are often momentary and just watch, appreciate, and enjoy their beauty. I will definitely have a raised bed or two of Zinnias in my Palisade Garden if not more!
If you have a sunny spot in your garden and relatively decent soil, Zinnias are easy to grow from seeds. Because of this, they are also economical as a packet of seeds costs a dollar or two at most. These beautiful, long stem flowers come in a variety of colors and can be purchased at your local grocery store, garden store or even your local Hardware store such as Ace or Home Depot! Next year, I am going to purchase some of my seeds from Floret (https://shop.floretflowers.com) so I can expand on my flower color palette! Those seed packets are a little pricier at $4.95 but they are also more unique in color so well worth it in my humble opinion!
Taking inspiration from Floret Farm owner, and author Erin Benzakein, this fall I decided to try and harvest my own Zinnia seeds to see if I could do it and if I can then next summer/fall I will harvest the seeds from the Floret flowers that I purchased and start to create my own home ground Zinnia flower palette! I’m also going to expand this experiment to include some other seeds by harvesting some of the spent flower heads in our neighborhood park (ie pink, red and orange Echinacea, aka Cone Flowers). I’m drying my Zinnia seeds now and will be harvesting the Echinacea flower heads this weekend. I’ve also purchased some Glass jars, and plan to pick up a small can of Chalk Board paint. Once I have the paint, I will paint it on the top of the lid or perhaps across the front of the jar so that I can label the jar(s) with a chalk pencil. My thought is then I can reuse and relabel the jars each year without the mess of peeling off the old label! This will make for a visually appealing and organized set of seed jars which will in turn make planting in the spring easy peasy!
