Hi! Let me show you what happened when I allowed the below flower, a red scabious zinnia, cross randomly with other zinnias in the garden (we will presume pollination carried out by insects). The mother flower, or at least, one similar example from the same plant, shown below: The offspring (shown at different scale): This one above has full, orange scabious flowers, about 1 1/2 inches across. This one above not a good flower at all, but it may be damaged by the weather conditions we've had, too. Not like it's mother.... This flower above looks like it may have had a whirligig dad...has a good supply of disc flowers. This above flower seems to me to be most like the mother flower, but the florets are a shorter red, and there are guard petals (damaged, I think) of a shade of fuscia. This is the only plant that has inherited the relatively narrower leaves of its maternal parent, too. The above flower seems uncertain of what to do--funny florets in the center, somewhat curly petals here and there, but keeping the red color for the most part. Last, but not least: This might be an interesting one. Daisy-like, some of the central florets turning brown due to too much rain, and more to come! I couldn't believe what sorts of flowers came from that red scabious mother! It's kind as if anything goes when there are random crosses. I have four or five plants that resulted from planned crosses with the red scabious and a red cactus. Will see what happens.... But I sure would like to get another red scabious like the one I had last summer.... ZM, when you said "recombinant" flower I thought you probably meant home-bred, but I asked anyway. I think what you're doing is the right thing. I am going to eliminate those plants that produce mediocre flowers to get better lines going here. For now, though, I am nipping off the undesirable first flowers without destroying the plants. I think some ugly flowers may be resulting from poor environmental conditions! I wonder if we should move to Part 11? ZM? JG

moccasin - those are some nice lights! i can see why you like them. I bet they're more than 20-30 $s each tho... I loved that the globes come in colors... I'd stay away from the red tho. OTOH that could be good for an emergency signal to a neighbor. I'm too poor to pay much for the lights - even if I find a SWern one i like it's sure to be more than 30.00 and I think I should limit it to that. I need 3 - plus a few (plus) inside need replaced based on they are UGLY. I found these 2 at lowe's. both plain but would do the job - cheaply. it'll probably be the first one unless I find something better for the price in the store. around 25.00 with clean lines. I'd have to see how my chubby little fingers fit for changing the bulb. it's better I don't have to mess with those little screws and chance dropping the globe since things seems to jump out of my hands. I remember changing bulbs in the screw on globe type yrs ago. max wattage is 100w this one is about 21.00. I like it, again clean, simple lines - this one has a frosted globe. has the little screws tho and max wattage is 60w.

Dear Jan, The most popular models in the States, and those of current production and thus easily available parts are the All American, Mirro, and Presto. There are many other old ones but rubber lid seals (like for a Burpee Pressure Canner) are no longer available. The All American is a beefy canner that does not use a rubber seal. It is metal to metal and costs 2 to 3 times as much as a Presto or Mirro. I currently use a 22 quart Presto from the 1980's and it is more than sufficient for my needs. I can fit 7 quart jars into it, double stack pints and half pints for a capacity of 20 to 24 smaller jars, and it has both a pressure guage and a 3 weight guage (5, 10, and 15 pounds) as most recipes in this area call for 10 pound pressure canning at 1000 feet elevation or less. The canner will reach 240 degrees Farenheight at this pressure and this is adequate (and necessary) to kill botulism spores. Pressure canning MUST be used for all low acid foods - primarily all vegetables and meat. Tomatoes are now regularly pressure canned for safety unless enough acid is added to bring the ph of the product down to 4.6 or less. Some tomatoe products in this country test to ph 4.7 or 4.8 which is too high to be safely canned by water sterilization (only 212 degrees Farenheight). By the way, if you use a pressure canner, boiling the jars is not required in advance (just a good wash). If there are those in this Forum who have any questions, please drop me a note. Regards from Southern California - Jim

Hi Alex, " I'm going to limit my crosses to something more manageable and mark the petals so that the smaller amount will have a greater likelihood of being my crosses. " OK, king's X. I concede that your petal marking makes a lot of sense for your situation. And I admire that you have evolved a workable technique for doing that. " I'm not going to go crazy and try to cross everything in sight. " That's a good plan. So you are going to develop a targeted strategy, and that involves some thinking and policy making. That can be a good thing. I have to admit that sometimes if I am carrying a loaded pollen floret, I do sometimes just apply it to an unlikely female zinnia on an impulse. "Your pollination technique is no doubt honed to an art, or at least enough to where you feel you have fairly successfully hit most of the petals of a bloom." I have evolved some techniques for making the most of high-value pollen. That involves using all the pollen readily available in the pollen floret, and then extracting the internal anther bundle from the floret, and using the pollen within it. I don't recommend using anther bundles to beginner breeders, because it isn't easy, like wiping florets on stigmas or using brush pollen transfers. But using anther bundles does make it possible to extract pollen from scabious florets. And using anther bundles lets you find pollen in other sources, like petaloids or tubular flower parts or unopened pollen florets. Pollen is where you find it. But using anther bundles is kind of tricky. You need forceps or tweezers with some fairly small or even sharp points. It could be a frustrating technique for beginning breeders. Changing the subject, this is a current recombinant that has some fantasy-like flower characteristics. There were once Fantasy Flowered commercial zinnia strains, and some were even award winners, but they have long since been discontinued. When I find recombinant fantasy flowered specimens. I will use them as breeders. I find it appalling that seed companies would discontinue AAS winning zinnias, and not even save seed stock from them for later re-introduction. When Burpee discontinued their bush-forming Burpeeanas, they didn't even save seed stock, so that later when they tried to re-introduce Burpeeanas, they had to try to re-invent them, with somewhat limited success. More later. ZM