5 Tips to Grow AMAZING Zinnias || How To Grow Zinnias || Cut Flower Garden

Hey y'all this is Amanda with She's a Mad Gardener and I am out on the front porch today. You might remember about a week ago I filmed outside in the snow in my little red riding hood jacket and we had gotten down to negative one and it is about a week later and it's almost 80 degrees outside today. Yeah so 80 degrees in the middle of the winter that is fairly normal for my area. The negative one degrees in the middle of the winter not so much. But anyway I'm out on the front porch today enjoying the nice weather. I can't be out on the back because we have a lot of wind today. It's pretty loud so you might hear some construction guys behind me that kind of stuff just because I am in a small suburban neighborhood kind of like cookie cutter you know all the matching houses. So I live there and so we're still under construction in our area but today I want to talk to you guys about five awesome tips for growing zinnias. Zinnias are one of my favorite blooms to grow. They're easy, they're bright, they're prolific, they're colorful and they bring so much joy and so I really love love growing them. So I wanted to go through just five easy tips to make growing zinnias even better than it already is. Now before I get started if you haven't subscribed make sure you hit that subscribe button and if you haven't hit that little notification bell to make sure that you're aware of every video that I upload make sure you do that right now. Yeah I'll wait. Okay my number one tip for growing zinnias is to start them from seed. You absolutely can purchase them at your local nurseries and such but they are so easy to start from seed that it is a complete waste of money. Do not spend your money on buying full-grown plants and zinnias. You can start it yourself. So you can start your seeds indoors. Typically zinnias like for the earth to be about 75 degrees right around there and before the seeds are all happy. So you can start indoors if you want to get a jump on the season or you can wait till your temperature warms up, your soil warms up and you can sow directly outside. I do both. I have a lot of border zinnias that I like to grow and I typically start those inside earlier on. They're lower zinnias and then my zinnias that grow tall and that I use for cut flowers I typically sow those directly outside. You can typically transplant zinnias outside March to about June in my area. My area is zone 8a or and they'll typically bloom from like May to like November y'all. A long time and I did a massive beautiful design of all what was left of my zinnias in November and they were just stunning and really I kind of just got to the point where I was ready to wrap up my garden for the season and so I just cut them all back to the ground. They have a really long growing season and they're really versatile in that way. Okay tip number two, plant your zinnias in a good location in your garden. They don't like shade, they want full sun so make sure you plant them in an area that is going to get full sun all day. Plant them in the earth and fertilize when you first plant them and they don't need to be fertilized after that and they do plenty fine after that point. Zinnias tend to get a lot of powdery mildew. They do not like their leaves to be wet so all of mine are watered from below utilizing a drip system. Now if you don't have a drip system just make sure you're watering them, you're not watering from above. Get down low and put the water down low on that bottom six inches underneath the blooms and that'll help reduce a little bit of that powdery mildew. Now if your zinnias get powdery mildew, when mine get powdery mildew I really don't care. I don't grow my zinnias for any type of foliage whatsoever. I cut them and I immediately strip off the foliage so I don't really care what they look like and I cut back my zinnias so frequently that it doesn't really stress the plant out if it has a lot of powdery mildew because every time I cut it back it establishes new growth and new leaves. So you know it's kind of up to you. I have found that I will say towards the end of the season like in October, November is typically when I see a whole lot more powdery mildew than I do earlier in the year and I'm sure that's in regards to the heat. As I get more towards rainy season in our area that's when I typically see a whole lot more of powdery mildew but I don't even treat it truthfully when it happens. However that's up to you. If you're putting zinnias in a space that's going to be seen by your whole neighborhood and you want them to be beautiful well then you can treat them for some powdery mildew. I plant all mine in the back for a cutting garden so I don't really care what they look like except for after I cut them. Tip number three, make sure to cut your seedlings back early. Now that's always a scary term cutting your seedlings. Why would you do that? Well the reason is because zinnias are a branching plant meaning basically they're not going to grow just straight up. If they're growing and you cut off a portion right above two leaves and I'll pop up a picture so you can see what I look like. You cut that portion off as they're going up it's going to branch from one to two branches at that point so you're going to get a lot more wow factor from it than if you just allowed it to start from the very beginning and grow straight up. So something to remember just pinch them back early and check them out and I pinch mine back typically like around six inches like I'll cut all the way back then and I like the branching to start off lower to the ground rather than allowing it to grow tall and then branching off then it gets really kind of top heavy. And then talking about top heavy I typically use some wire basically a wire grid that I kind of push into the ground and the zinnias grow up through it and then it kind of holds everything in place and keeps it from flopping. You can also put up some different types of netting you can stake your zinnias whatever is kind of easiest for you. I grow a whole lot of zinnias and so I just like these forms that I can just put in different places and they all kind of lean up against one another works out really really well. Sometimes I'll get a random stray zinnia seed that's kind of floated through a river or something and it's gone to a different area and then I just might use like one of my green stakes one of my tomato stakes or something to hold it upright and that's not a problem either. Tip number four cut your flowers off cut them all the time bring them inside enjoy them. It's really hard to say something like that you get this big beautiful bloom and I'm like cut it off bring it in but the more you cut on zinnias the more prolific they're going to be every time you make a cut it's going to encourage two more to show up so make sure you cut them frequently bring them in enjoy them they'll typically last about 10 days in a vase make sure you change out the water that's always super important but yeah you can get a lot of life from zinnias but pretty much the worst thing you can do for a zinnia is just allow it to grow and not trim it back. If you are wanting to grow zinnias for cut flowers you need to cut them cut them bring them in enjoy them and more flowers will grow quickly in their place. A lot of zinnias have a 35 day turnaround I mean literally seed in the ground 35 days later boom you have flowers amazing some of them are up to 60 days but even at 60 days that's almost instant gratification for most gardeners because it's really hard like I love delphiniums but gosh it takes them 20 days even to just even to germinate I mean so they are just a long drawn out flower but zinnias instant gratification and number five one of my very favorite tips is save your seeds at the end of the season allow the zinnias the last round the zinnias just allow them to dry on the stem outside and as they become brown and brittle the petals very carefully pull away and we'll have a little zinnia seed at the end so you can actually save your zinnia seeds and then utilize them for the next year now I have been lucky in my zones when we have mild winters you know not like this winter but when we have mild winters a lot of my zinnias will reseed themselves that's not going to be the case this year so I have multiple zinnias that I pulled from last year and saved the seeds however you can purchase zinnias from a number of places I like purchasing from Johnny's I'll purchase from some big box locations I like Botanical Interest I like Park Seeds all of them have fabulous zinnias that you can purchase very unique soft beautiful ones and tons of gorgeous bright colorful over the top ones just a wide variety for you to choose from but you can save those zinnias at the end zinnia seeds at the end I just save mine and I put them in a little plastic bag I typically leave the plastic bag open a little bit but once they're dried out put them in my plastic bag write the name on them and I'm good to go for the next year okay a couple bonus things about zinnias pollinators love them I love standing outside my zinnia garden and watching just butterflies just jump from place to place and to see the big old fat bumblebees burying them their faces in there and they absolutely love zinnias so it brings a lot of joy to a garden I love zinnias for a children's garden because first of all that instant gratification they grow very quickly and the wide variety of bold colors but most importantly the number of pollinators that come to them that's fabulous for kids to be able to watch these bumblebees up close or observe monarch butterflies or anything along those lines so fabulous as a pollinator garden so zinnias actually come in a wide variety of kind of shapes and textures and they're all typically round of course the bloom is but they can come in like a daisy type form they can come in like a double bloom where one layer petals and then the second layer of petals blooms out they can come in a ball form where the petals kind of round themselves out there's so many there's they even kind of look like a dahlia because so many petals can bloom on those ball forms which is really great they can have a really large like I've had zinnias like up to like four and a half five inches across and then I've had zinnias they're really tiny and sweet and small which is fabulous I love zinnias for how they mature through their season or through their growing season so a lot of them will bloom one color and then fade to a different color which is really neat this one border zinnia I grew this last year it's a coral low growing zinnia approximately 12 inches high it started off a bold deep almost reddish coral and then faded through coral and a blush and then finally to white it was amazing absolutely amazing so yeah definitely beautiful blooms but yet you can get them to look like a lot of different things I like them because they're large bold statement flowers that are easy for me to grow you know I love growing dahlias but dahlias are a little bit more high maintenance and a little bit more expensive but when I grow zinnias I get a lot of them for a small amount of money and for a little bit of care it just doesn't take very much to get them going so they're fabulous and cut arrangements as a big bold just statement bloom in the design okay I hope you guys enjoyed um this sweet little video about zinnias and all of these pictures that I'm posting are my zinnias from my garden and I'm also going to post after this I'm going to post some photos of some new zinnias that I'm going to be growing this year and see if you are growing any of those same zinnias and if you have a favorite zinnia I would love to know what it is if you have one that is just a showstopper list it below in the comments because I would love to know what it is I'd like to know whatever your secret is for growing it so if you have zinnias secrets and that just make your zinnias more prolific than ever drop those below let me know share them with the group because we'd love to do that if you haven't subscribed please make sure you subscribe and make sure you hit that notification bell and leave me a comment I love to hear from y'all even if it's just a few hearts I'd love to hear from you guys every comment every subscription every hit of that notification bell helps keep my channel going and I really appreciate any of y'all's support along the way as always she's a mad gardener or a decorator or anything else that she wants to be thank you so much