The reason I like zinnias is that they are so easy, their vase life is long and they provide a kaliedascope of colorin the garden.

This year has been pretty much a bust for us with market flowers, but from prior years the Zinnias have been a great no-fuss flower. The more you cut, the more blooms you get. You have lots of variety in color and bloom type and the vase life is long.

I am STILL waiting on my zinnias to bloom! Very cool wet summer so far and they budded over a week ago but still no blooms.

I have giant benarys in white, red, purple and salmon as well as quite a few Lime Envy.

Anybody else in this area experiencing this delayed blooming?

Yep, kforrest, my zinnias are just dogging it, a few here, a few there, and the quality is pretty poor. I'm throwing away two or three for every one I cut. Maybe next year I'll try putting a low tunnel over them to help speed them along. And last year I was cutting sunflowers by this time, but I think those are still a couple of weeks off for me. Woe is me. This won't be the year I get rich in the flower growing biz.

I'm a few hundred miles north of you, so I'm a little surprised that you're not getting even a few blooms. Did you start them at your usual time?

To answer Joan's question, what I usually like about zinnias include the strong stems, strong colors, length of blooming period, and good vase life.

ThinMan

I'm a market grower in NH and Zinnias are my favorite annual for cut flowers. They are a "cut-and-come-again" plant which means when you cut one stem others will take over providing you with non-stop production of flowers.

My favorite Zinnias are Benary's, State Fair, Burpeeana, Giant Cactus, California Giants . . . any tall growing Zinnia producing large flowers will do but these are some of my favorites.

Production this years has not been as robust due to a cool, wet spring-early summer, but am still getting good production. Now that the weather pattern has finally changed to warm things are doing better.

We grow in raised beds, uses soaker hoses under black plastic, composted cow manure and organic fertilizer, lite on nitrogen and heavy phophorous and potash.

My favorite plants zinnias, even though in sunny Florida I have many choices nothing makes me smile like ZINNIAS.
I grow them year round.
They add delightful color and resting spots for my beautiful butterflies.
The best part is you can toss the seeds on the ground and up they come. I especially enjoy the volunteer seedlings or those whose seeds I harvested and planted not costing me anything. Packs of Zinnia seeds make wonderful and inexpensive stocking stuffers and Easter Basket fillers for the Junior gardener in your life.

I grow zinnias every year. They were very slow to bloom this summer. Usually by this time they look pretty bad but they are bloomng away. I love taking boquets to school to share with the staff. I planted several varities
with several different colors but most of them are pink and the blooms are smaller than usual. But still the butterflies and I do love them. I love to put them in an old white enamel pitcher that belonged to my mother.

Finally we've gotten a couple weeks of sunny and warm to hot weather and the Zinnias have finally "popped" with great production and size.

Prior to that most of the summer was wet and cool. While the Zinnias were doing OK they were certainly not floriferous as they should be.

Funny what a little sun and warmth will do for a garden.