Pls8xx, "One thing that has been on my mind the last few weeks is how important it is to me that a zinnia have a short compact plant form. I grow in a sand/clay mix rather than topsoil. It will hold plants upright fine when dry, but when wet the soil looses its strength and the tall plants become vulnerable to wind knocking them over." You have made a good case that you do need zinnias with a more compact plant habit. Last year, we had a very violent storm with high winds of 50mph and it blew down literally dozens of my zinnias. I had concrete re-bar tomato cages around a few of my more critical "breeders" and they were protected. But many of my big zinnia plants snapped off at the ground and many more lost their basal branches and some lateral branches. Interestingly, some of my big bushy scabiosa flowered zinnias and most of those F1s with a "scabi" parent came through just fine, with amazing resistance to the high winds. As is usual in a high wind storm here, for a period of hours we lost our electrical power, our telephone land line, and our cable connection. I studied the wreckage in my zinnia patch to see "what went wrong" structurally with my zinnias. As is usual for me, there were some surprises. I plan to apply what I learned from my "crash investigation" to make better decisions about plant structure this year. For one thing, I had planted a lot of Burpeeanas, from both Burpee and from Stokes. I had a lot of "out of the seed packet" Burpeeanas and some F1 hybrids from crosses that I made between Burpeeanas. (Incidentally, your picture of the "original" red Burpeeanas shows just how nice that Burpeeana bushy look can be.) To my amazement, some of the most disastrous structural failures were in my Burpeeanas. They have what I refer to as a "candelabra" stem structure, with basal branches coming out from the main stem at a 90 degree angle. Even though the stems look thick and strong, there is a kind of "joint" at the attachment point. Some of the basal branches that were in contact with the soil had actually sprouted roots and were apparently in the process of becoming independent plants. It's almost as if the stem joint was "willing" to detach from the main stem. But even higher up, those branches that cantilevered out from the main stem at a 90-degree angle seemed inherently weak. In almost all cases, the branches broke at their attachment points to the main stem. The plants that seemed resistant to branches breaking off had their branches leaving the main stem at a much more acute angle, like 45 or even 30°. So their branches were headed upward at the attachment point. For whatever reason, those branches seemed much better attached, even if the plant habit was more generally upward than outward. Despite the fragility of the Burpeeana plants in high winds, I plan to continue growing them and selecting the best flowers and plants. I will just be looking for stronger attachment points for their branches. If you want to emphasize compactness in your zinnia breeding, you can start with some strains that are already compact and cross some other zinnias with them. I personally have quit crossing the lower growing zinnias because I don't like kneeling and bending over to do my cross pollinating. I've always had a tendency toward lower back pain from my gardening, and a lot of bending over just aggravates it. However, short zinnias are interesting looking and fascinating in crosses, so I am thinking about constructing some really high raised beds that might bring those short zinnias up to a more comfortable working distance. There are some short zinnias that you can cross with tall zinnias that will produce some intermediate compact F1 hybrids, and the F2s from them should sort out into a wide range of plants that you could pick from for further breeding. Three of the shortest are the Thumbelina zinnia, the Zinnita zinnia, and Zinnia Short Stuff. Here is another view of Short Stuff and here is another seed source: Short Stuff at New England seed. Some taller but still very compact zinnias are Zinnia Swizzle cherry and ivory, Zinnia Swizzle scarlet and yellow, Zinnia Dreamland hybrids, Zinnia Magellan mix, and I just found that Zinnia Peter Pan mix is apparently still available. By crossing some of those compact zinnias with other zinnias you should have the basis for creating several new strains of compact zinnias, with various degrees of compactness. MM

Carla I'm not familiar with the model you mention and could not find it on Amazon - but I do have a cool pix - it's a S10 and I LOVE it - I think Nikon takes really amazing pictures and they are really easy to use for a non camera person like me - I don't like reading manuals and stuff (leave that to DH who likes playing with electronics) and even with the basic info I get through a quick look at the manual I find it easy to use. I don't know if this will help at all ... but I don't think I can go back to another brand after using Nikon. Aprille

LOL, schoolhouse, that was the first thing I thought too - how healthy everything looks! My plants have lots of ratty foliage and bug-eaten blooms, lol. I've got to get myself a nice little point-and-shoot. My DH bought me a beautiful digital SLR camera with complete manual over-ride, which I am still trying to learn. For serious photography it's great, but to run out to take a quick pic for ID or something like that, it's a pain. Have fun with your new toy! Of course we now expect lots of pics! :) Dee

Nerd alert. Each pixel in your camera receives light and "fires" as a certain amount of a color (red, green, blue are standard). Sometimes, pixels get confused for one reason or another and fire the wrong amount. That's noise. It shows up in your picture as a pixel that's obviously the wrong color; but since the pixels are small, it just looks "grainy." Think of it as the visual version of the "hiss" that we all loved about cassette tapes. Noise-filtering software, either in-camera or in Photoshop, smooths over the noise by identifying pixels that are obviously not the same color as their neighbors and replacing them with the "right" color. The plus side is that the noise goes away; the minus side is that detail goes away, too. DSLR's have larger sensor sizes (15x22mm up to 24x36mm for the whole sensor), and non-DSLR's have smaller sensor sizes. DSLR pixels are therefore larger and thus less likely to be confused. My Lumix has a pretty small sensor (5x7mm for the whole sensor, 1/9 of the area of the smallest DSLR). The up side of that is that it's easy to give a small sensor a large zoom with a small lens. Hence, 12x zoom is quite doable. The down side is that the small sensor is relatively noisy, and in low-light settings, the noise gets pretty bad. I figured that I could live with noise in low light, since most of my subjects only pose in sunshine. And mostly, I was right. Occasionally, though, I wish I could get a good, detailed shot of a Satyr in the woods without having to resort to a flash. Jeff