Unpredictable results

What's wrong with this photo? Well, whatever its aesthetic faults I don't expect any of you to come up with the answer I have in mind. What's wrong with this photo is that there are no white flowers here. I wanted at least some white ones, and more yellowy yellow ones for that matter. And definitely no pink ones. That's what I get for growing plants from saved seeds. Oh, well, it looks quite nice and the whole thing has been fun to do, and it does serve as a reminder that there really isn't anything to match the unpredictability of growing plants from seeds. There's always the chance of a big surprise!

Here's the scene this morning. Zinnias. Mostly orange, some sort-of yellow, and just a few in musk-stick pink.

This is what I was hoping for, and didn't get. Last year's white zinnias were so pretty. Look closely at the centre of each bloom and it looks like a gaggle of micro frangipanis. So last year I decided to save some seed heads from my white, yellow and orange Zinnia angustifolias and raise them from seed for another summer show. Compared to the other, more common, types of zinnias which are almost 1m tall and usually in lurid pinks that would be very at home in Las Vegas, these smaller, lower, wide-spreading zinnias only get to about 40cm tall, spread 60cm wide and come in white, yellow, orange and a not-so-outrageous pink. They're harder to find in garden centres so that's partly why I decided to save the seeds. The other reason was simple gardener's curiosity.

Late last autumn I snipped off the faded flower heads and popped them into paper bags, which then spent the winter hanging up in my shed.

I labelled each bag white, yellow or orange, and then in spring it was time to harvest the seeds. There were hundreds of them, dark, flattened spearhead shapes.

I didn't really need to label the bags. A dried orange flower.

And a dried white flower.

You can see the seeds quite clearly here.

In they went into punnets of seed-raising mix in late September, where my nifty, cheap mini greenhouses protected them from any spring chills overnight.

The seed germination rates weren't that great, about 50% at best, but I did get babies in all colours after about two weeks.

Then, another five or so weeks later, the seedlings went in, spaced about 35cm apart.

As each plant came into bud and then into bloom, I initially was delighted that the whole 'growing from seed' thing seemed to have worked so well. But soon after that it was becoming obvious that I could have any colour I liked, as long as it was a tone of orange.

No white ones! And then when I saw this pink interloper come up to wink at me, that was it. I want a recount Mother Nature! Where's my white ones? Ain't seeds unfair?

Well, not really. The truth is that seeds are magnificent. Thank goodness it was only a few months ago that I had read Michael Pollan's wonderful book, 'The Botany of Desire' and in particular his chapter on apples and Johnny Appleseed (whose real name was John Chapman). I always wondered if I would get what I hoped for with my zinnias, but deep down I knew it was no certainty.

Ever since I read that chapter on Johnny Appleseed I knew that seeds are genetically programmed to be both predictable and unpredictable at the same time. It's how plants survive in nature – by not being totally predictable. Sometimes it might just be the oddballs which are the ones to do best and make it through hard times. So, from my little experience I suppose that oranges and yellows are the dominant colours with my zinnias, and the whites and pinks are the chance occurrences that I can't rely on, but shouldn't be surprised to see at any time.

PS: if you can, please find time to read Michael Pollan's book, or at least that chapter on apples. The essence of the story is that Johnny Appleseed grew his many thousands of apple trees from European apple tree seeds, and it was these seeds' ability to occasionally mutate and surprise, to throw out completely new varieties of apples, which then led to the development of several new and wonderful North American apple varieties perfectly suited – or at least compared with the old European varieties, much better suited – to the climate and soil of the New World.

Patiently seedy

Many of my fellow bloggers inspire me to try new things, or at least to think again about the approach I'm taking in my garden. Michelle at From Seed to Table often inspires me to try growing all sorts of things from seed in my food garden. While she's a wonderful food gardener her influence has extended to my flower garden, and right now I'm trying to grow zinnias from seed I have saved from last summer's plantings.

Here's one of the two patches from last year, in the colours I want to plant again this year: whites, yellows and oranges. The other patch had a fair bit of pink and red in it, and they're just not the flower colours I want or need here. This plant is Zinnia angustifolia, which is a lowish-growing (to 30cm/1 foot tall), widish spreading (70cm/2 feet) zinnia. There's another type of zinnia that's commonly grown here, but it's a much taller growing plant (75cm tall at least) and its colours border on lurid, especially the pinks.

Once the zinnias faded in autumn after a long flower show that started in early summer, I let them fade a bit more then cut off all the orange flowers and put them in one brown paper bag, and all the white flowers went into another brown paper bag. Then they spent a quiet winter hanging around in my garden shed.

A few weeks ago, the weather looked like it was warming up for spring and so I took down the bags to check out the contents. Having never before collected many flower seeds, and no zinnias at all, I wasn't sure what to expect, but it looked like there were hundreds of seeds there.

The dried flower heads themselves were noisy to handle, crinkly-dry as can be.

And for that matter, they were as brittle as can be, too. Just the lightest crumble in my fingers and they fell apart.

The result was about 50:50 chaff and seeds, and not knowing any better way to clear the chaff, I quietly and patiently picked it out with my fingers. Thank goodness for interesting radio shows (in this case 'The Music Show', Radio National, Saturday mornings 10-12, with Andrew Ford) – they make drudgery much easier to get through.

The zinnia seeds are distinctly darker than the chaff. I was hoping for plump seeds, but they're a bit scrawny, but not knowing what to expect all I could do was forge on regardless. For all I know they could be either perfectly normal or shockingly malnourished. Only time will tell.

Seed-raising HQ: my super-cheap mini greenhouses, each less than 10 bucks at Bunnings. The little sliders in the lids let you adjust the air flow.

I filled several old seedling punnets with seed-raising mix and, for insurance, added two seeds per cell. I then lightly sprinkled over just enough seed-raising mix to barely cover them, then watered them in well with a spray mist. Marker tabs in so I know which colour is which, greenhouse lids on, off to a brightly lit spot out of all direct sunshine. Waiting... waiting...

Babies! The first came up after about 10 days, and for a while I was a panicky parent, with only about a quarter of the seeds coming up. "So they were scrawny" I first thought, with a pang of guilt. But the weather here these last two weeks has been horribly cold for spring, and just these last couple of days things have warmed up a bit. And more seeds are coming up all the time. The germination rate is up to about two-thirds of the number of seeds sown, which will provide me with more plants than I need. Not guilty, your honour!

As for what I need, I'd like lots of these white ones, please.

And plenty of these oranges and yellows, too.

But none of these pink ones, though. And it's not just a boy thing, either. My wife Pam isn't a hot pink girl, either. She loves all sorts of greens, and colours in earthy tones, plus apricots, blues, yellows, lavenders, wine-reds and, if it has to be pink it's down the dusky end of the spectrum.

Now the next phase of the operation is of course raising the babies to become a gaggle of healthy youngsters over the next few weeks, then waiting for signs of colour in their flower buds to see how true they're coming up from seed. I'll report in sometime in December I suspect.

However, the best part about this little project for me is that it's the very opposite experience of that modern ailment, instant gratification. This has been a long, slow process which has stretched out, in its own leisurely way, for many months, and it has several weeks more to go before the first flowers appear. In an important little way this 'zinnias from saved seed' project has taught me (well, maybe just reminded me) that growing anything from seed is patience yielding its own very special rewards. I want to do more of this.

Hot colours

Maybe it's the intense, dry summer heat that has brought on the flowering of my zinnias – after all, they are natives of Mexico – but just one little punnet of scrawny seedlings planted on December 7 has turned into this riot of hot colour eight weeks later. I often tend to think of different flower beds as if they're musical bands, and zinnias definitely have a touch of the noisy, brash Mariachi band to them, trumpets and trombones blaring cheerfully in the dusty heat of the village square.

Lunchtime, in the midday sun, on February 7. One punnet, many colours, as promised. As for limiting themselves to 20cm wide and 20cm high as promised on the label, I don't think so.

I find it so hard to believe that this was my potato patch in early December that I plan to do a little blog soon on how this one patch, the sunniest one in my sunny backyard, has gone through such a wide range of uses, and personalities, in one year. Behind the zinnias are the marigolds and the potager patch, where the cool green parsley borders help to preserve some decorum.

Within the zinnia zone, the colours are many, varied and always hot. Reds aplenty.

Pink is definitely not one of my favourite colours, nor is Pam all that fond of it either – she's more of a green girl – but if you're going to be pink you might as well be really pink, like these zinnias, I say.

Orange is one of the more sneered-at garden colours amongst gardening writers, and if you're not an orange fan you can have a good old sneer at my zinnias.

More down the apricot end of the spectrum, these zinnias could almost stand accused of good taste but, being zinnias, that isn't really on the cards.

However, it's not just the zinnias laying on the fiery hues and blazing away in the midday sun. The Jalapeno chillies are chiming in nicely across the path with rapidly ripening reds.

And the marigolds reflect the sunshine with their orange and yellow pompoms. In fact the yellow marigolds reflect the moonlight nicely, too!

Yes, of course, my choice of summer flower colours is deliberately bright and cheerful, and that's because of the quality of the Australian sunlight. It's bright, dazzlingly bright. Several years ago, after spending a year travelling in Europe, the first thing I noticed when I arrived back here in Australia was the light. Always so bright, usually so clear, too. It took me a while to get used to it. Then, several weeks later, I was out driving around the countryside and the incredible beauty of the bushland and the bright Australian sky just hit me with such a powerful force that I saw everything here in a new light. I saw beauty all around me, and it's been that way ever since.

As an example, I just pointed my camera out the window and this is the colour of the sky above. Visitors to Australia often comment on the blueness of the southern sky, and I cannot help but agree with them.

Moving the camera lens around a bit further I caught Sol in all its merciless baking glory (or was it Sol who caught me?). In this kind of glaring heat and light, all subtlety of colour in flowers either burns to a crisp or merely fades from sight.

In summer here in Oz, it's only the eye-achingly bright colours that stand a chance of surviving more than a week or two. At other times of year it's a different story, fortunately – autumn, winter and spring are kinder to plants and people – but right now, in the middle of summer, razzle dazzle rules.

Organised mayhem

It's amazing how rapidly things can change in a potato patch, and how rapidly the patch can go from looking very respectable to utterly disreputable. And while it's probably a bit early to harvest all the spuds, quite frankly I'm sick of the look of those scruffy plants now. They've got to go! And we've been zucchini-ed to death as well. So this sunny Saturday is organised mayhem day. Out with the spuds and the zeeks, in with summer flowers, chillies and beans.

Late October, all seemed not merely well in the spud patch, they were spiffy! People had told me potato plants were boring. Nonsense! Modest the flowers may be, but they score bonus points for simplicity in my book. And those adolescent leaves just radiate green goodness.

I was still something of an admirer of the potato patch at this stage, on November 13. But it must have been very soon after this photo was taken that the patch went rapidly downhill, while it made tubers underground.

This crappy spectacle would be fine in a large garden where you could let the spuds get on with their above-ground fading while they produced below-ground crops, but in tiny Garden Amateur Land they're centre stage. Pam and I just looked at the patch, looked at each other, and said "it's gotta go". So, though I know I should let the plants slog on for a couple more weeks before getting the maximum yield out of the patch, it's simply not worth it. Harvest, ho!

It's good, dirty fun harvesting spuds. I got covered in soil, compost and mulch but found plenty of them. Figuring what to do with the enormous hills of compost and sugar cane mulch is a bit of a problem now, but I made good use of my big plastic purple scoop. It was the ideal soil mover, gently picking up spuds without damaging the skins.

And here's the premature harvest. Total weigh-in is 6.2 kilograms. The big majority are King Edwards (4.6kg) with a measly, disappointing 800g of Kennebecs and 800g of Dutch Creams. If you add in the 900g of King Edwards which I prematurely harvested about 10 days ago, that takes the total harvest to 7.1kg. Not bad for an impatient, premature harvest but not great, either. As a spud newbie, I'm happy enough with the result, and I've learned a lot and at least have some fresh organic spuds to enjoy. By the way, the King Edwards have been lovely to eat, especially when baked or fried. Of course we can't possibly hope to eat all these spuds, so we'll just give lots of them to neighbours and friends, and try to get through as many as we can over the next week or so.

All my compost bins are now chock-full of the old compost and sugar cane mulch used to make the hills for the potatoes. The potato-growing compost is also full of worms, including some absolute whoppers, so this stuff should break down very rapidly in the summer heat. I'll make sure to tumble it over as often as possible, to help it along.

The zucchini patch was still going strong, with no sign of the cropping slowing down. But we are zucchini-ed to death. We've had them steamed, fried, baked and stir-fried. They've been teamed with tomatoes, feta, garlic, chervil, eggplant and countless other vegies. We've grated them and chopped them, sliced them and baked them whole. And no matter what we do we have too many zucchinis. Of course we've given them away to friends and neighbours, too. And still we have too many. The variety is Black Beauty and it's a terrific cropper. No complaints there.

It's incredible how the zucchinis keep on cropping despite the patches of powdery mildew here and there. I've posted before about using the organic milk spray to keep this disease under control, and it does work pretty well provided you never stop doing it. The limitation is that the milk spray reduces the spread of mildew to unaffected leaves, but the affected leaves do keep on going downhill and end up being cut off, purely because they look so sad and patchy.

I'm sure the ladybirds will be livid about me pulling out the zucchinis prematurely. Every leaf on the zucchinis had one or more ladybirds in attendance, so it was probably a day of infamy for them. The great zucchini massacre of summer 08.

Zucchini plants creep across the ground as they produce fruit. It seemed as if at virtually every stalk junction another zucchini fruit came up. We had a policy of harvesting them smaller than the usual shop size, as they have a better flavour when small, but if I missed a fruit somewhere deep inside the thicket of leaves, it would quickly streak away to jumbo marrow size in just a day or two.

One thing I won't miss is the prickly spines on the leaves and stalks of the zucchini plants. I came off second best every morning as I harvested them. If I ever see anyone with forearms covered in tiny scratches, I'll no longer suspect they're a junkie, I'll just give them the benefit of the doubt and think "there goes another zucchini harvester".

This is the former potato patch by late afternoon. Low-growing spreading groundcover style zinnias, Zinnia angustifolia (given to me by a friend and workmate, thank you Geoffrey!) on the left, a Habanero chilli in the centre, and more zinnias (another low-growing type, but Zinnia elegans, reaching about the same height as Z. angustifolia (about 20-30cm). Very easy-care, drought-hardy, colourful and long-flowering.

Up at the former zucchini patch, more Zinnia angustifolia from Geoffrey's leftovers. The pot in the background contains dwarf bush bean seeds, which hopefully will provide a crop of beans later in the summer if all goes well.

And so the organised mayhem of spud and zucchini evictions makes way for the comparatively docile look of hardy summer annuals surrounded by a sea of mulch. I'm ready for a lazy break during the heat of summer. This Saturday got up to 35°C and that was a bit too hot for me. I spent the rest of the evening drinking water, trying to replace the fluids I had lost during the day.

The zinnias thrive in the heat, so too the chillies and the beans. From now until late February, I'm planning on being a much lazier gardener. There's a crop of tomatoes to tend to, a potager patch to coax into prettiness, beans to harvest, salad greens to keep ticking over, and fruit flies to battle. That'll do me for a lazy gardening agenda.