Zinnia: The Heart of the Summer Cutting Garden

We are well into the depths of summer and fall is just around the corner but I hope your summer cutting garden is still working hard to put out blooms. We cut buckets and buckets of stems each week out of our quaint field. The flowers work hard as long as they get water and we enjoy all the little beauties and surprises we find along the way.

We have several different flowers we use in our summer bouquets that are good producers and all of them deserve credit for making a beauitful bouquet. Of course you know that the zinnia is at the top of the summer bouquet beauty list. She is truly the "heart" of our summer bouquets until the dahlias take over. Dahlias we love but they can be divas and our zinnias don't seem quite so fussy even though sometimes they make us a little crazy too.

Our girl,the zinnia, has so many different varieties you can grow. I love all the bold colors of the Benary's Giant's-pink, white, red, green, wine, orange, yellow, purple, coral and more. And then there is the queen series with antiqued pink, lime, and orange/peachy colors-this is one of my favorties. And then you have the Oklahoma series-they remind me of a smaller version of the Benary's series. The Oklahoma salmon is probably my favorite in that series. And then you have Floret- so many new varieties I just love-"Golden Hour", "Unicorn", "Apline Glow", "Little Flower Girl" and more. Dawn Creek has some beauties as well-"Pastels,Peach, Honey, and Blush". This year I have enjoyed the "Ballerina" variety from Johnnys' as well as another cactus zinnia. I mean come on, what's not to love about these beauties. There are so much beauty in all those varieties that it's tempting to have them all.

Not only is our zinnia a beauty queen, but she is also a production powerhouse boss-give her what she loves-water and some food- and she will not let you down. We could easily cut hundreds from her every week when all the zinnia plants are blooming.

She is a little tricky to cut if you are not sure when to cut. Have you ever heard of the "wiggle test"? Well this is how you cut zinnias to make sure they will not flop. Put your thumb and index about 6 inches from the bloom and gently wiggle the stem. If she is ready to cut she will be stiff and tall when you wiggle her-if not her head will flop around a little like a rag doll. Not sure if you're doing it right? Just wiggle more of the blooms around you and before long you will understand the wiggle test. I wish I could tell you I have the wiggle test perfected but I still find myself cutting them early because I am drooling over a particular bloom.

If none of this has convinced you to grow zinnias next year (it's too late to seed them this year to bloom in KY before our first frost) then maybe this will. Sometimes when the flowers bloom you get the most interesting expressions of the flower-just like the heart in the above picture. I guess you could call it a deformity but I think of it as just the unique way it expresses itself to the world. Kind of like us all, right? Unique. And the heart of our summer cutting garden. :)