Hmmm maybe I coo them back on. :) So far, I've not had the experience of losing blooms post shipping, but maybe it's because I don't give them a chance to drop. Generally, I leave a flower or two for a week or so if a new plant comes with one, but then I take them off and give the plant some time to get settled into it's new home. I like my plants to have healthy, uniform foliage and a good start on life here before putting much energy into blooming. There have been a few I couldn't bear to disbud right away... I got a Princess K Rei from plantmaniac on Ebay and it came loaded with blooms and buds. The plant was small and nearly dwarfed by gorgeous flowers. I kept telling myself I should take them off, but waited a month before having the strength to do the deed. Since then, the plant has grown by about 30% and is working on another round of buds...just barely visible along the stem. Thanks for the thumbs-up on the light shelf. It makes taking care of the plants easy because I can move it away from the wall to get at both sides. My thought was that as the plants grow it will be difficult to get them out over the top of each other and I'd hate to break flowers moving things around overhead. Those are "daylight" bulbs in cheap fixtures from Home Depot - the bulbs cost nearly twice the price of the fixtures, but the violets seem to like them and that's the important thing. Most of them have nice flat growth patterns, so it looks to me like the light is sufficient. There are a couple...Arabian Nights (another Lyons) which seem determined to grow upright (bottom shelf, center right) and Apache Sunburst (Munk from PJ's Plants N Things on Ebay, also bottom center but on the left). They are both immature plants with new growth coming on, and I'm hoping they lay down over time.

Thought I would resurrect this just to see if anyone else is making progress on this problem. I've already had to toss one big basketful of rose petals this summer (the ones I started collecting before posting here.) I'm experimenting with freezing, but haven't thawed any yet to check the results. Every flower that comes into the house now goes straight to the kitchen sink for a thorough spraying. After the petals are dried I flash-freeze on a cookie sheet and store them in an air tight container in the freezer. The thermometer registers just below zero in there, so we'll see. Whatever this petal-eating critter is, it apparently prefers roses. I've got air-dried gromphrena, hydrangea, and gardenias from last year and the year before, stored in clear plastic bins, with no sign of damage. I'll have to choose my moment carefully for thawing these frozen petals to minimize the ambient humidity. It's always humid in MS to some degree, but we've had SO much rain this year - even with the a/c going full blast I get moisture on the top of the salt shaker. Just thought I'd check in. Anyone else experimenting? Nena

Hmm, I miss a day or two, I miss a LOT here, ladies! I've been running a lot, distracted, and just plain scatterbrained. Must be spring fever (at least, I'd rather blame that than a mid-life crisis, lol!). I have most of Debbya's box ready to go - I just want to do one more thing, then send it on its way. It's been fun learning about your names and their history. My first name has NOTHING to do with my family heritage - my parents just liked it. My middle name, Marie, is for my mother, Mary. My daughter's first name is Juliana, for the medieval Christian mystic Juliana of Norwich. Her middle name is Pearl, for my grandmother, who died years ago. Our son's name is Ian (Scottish for John - his grandfather, great uncle, and uncle-in-law are all John/Jon, and his father is Sean, the Irish form of John). His middle name is Joseph, for one of my favorite men in the Bible. Oh, how we debated about Ian's name! He's our first, and my mother was pestering us mightily about what names we were considering. So, we had an ugly name contest, and kept telling her all sorts of outrageous choices. Keep in mind, our last name is RUDD. So, Dudley Bud Rudd, Elmer Rudd, Evan Rudd (think Evinrude motors), Vladimir Rudd (just because), etc. etc. AND, we couldn't use any names that started with C or K, because that would make his abbreviated name C. Rudd. CRUD. That cancelled out all sorts of names we happened to like, for both kids, lol! My favorite outdoors tool is definitely bypass pruning shears. Indoors, I have to say that I really MISS my dustbuster. It recently croaked after years of faithful service, and NOW I realize just how much I used it to clean up after the kids, birds, and cats. LOLOL about the moon story! Our son stayed up late to watch part of the eclipse, and really thought it was cool. Laurel

Hi Annie, " I removed the petal-less blooms. If I let them dry, can I harvest seeds or are the seeds not going to be viable?" You don't even need to let them dry. The green seeds can become viable as soon as 3 weeks after pollination. So it is possible that some of your zinnia heads already contain viable seeds. Shuck them and see what you have. There are basically two kinds of zinnia seeds. The petal seeds occur at the base of petals. The floret seeds occur at the base of pollen florets. These are some fairly mature green seeds.The next photo shows some greener green seeds. If you gently pinch a zinnia seed between your thumb and forefinger, you can feel whether there is an embryo inside. Be gentle, the embryo is a baby plant. My graph paper is ruled 10 lines per inch. You can remove the embryos from green seeds and plant the embryos, if you want to do that experiment. The bottom row shows the steps in removing an embryo from a green seed. A sharp X-Acto knife if handy for that. I have started whole flats of zinnias indoors by planting embryos. However, I usually stop after the second or third stage of surgery, because that is enough to give the embryo inside the green seed access to water. If you just plant a green seed without surgery, the green "skin" is alive and impervious to water, and it has to die and dry some to become pervious. That can take a week to ten days, and I am usually in a hurry, so I do a little surgery on a green seed to speed up the germination process, to somewhere between two days to six days. Don't be afraid to experiment with your zinnia seeds. ZM