Wilson, "I will keep the seeds to see what happens next year. If it is a new strain, what do I do with the seeds?" Good question. That depends on how many viable seeds, if any, this current specimen produces. If it doesn't produce any viable seeds, that will be that. If it produces a lot, and you grow a whole bed of marigolds saved from this mutant, you may very well see a whole range of variation in that bed, including some specimens even stranger than this one. You will have the option of picking your favorites from those specimens and saving seeds from them. By that time your curiosity may be sufficiently whetted so as to experiment with cross-pollinating some of your mutant specimens. It took Burpee many years of running the contest for the nearest-to-white marigolds to get commercial strains of "white marigolds". I raise zinnias as a hobby, and dabble at breeding them, and whenever I see a mutant zinnia, I save seeds from it and frequently I will cross it with other interesting zinnias. I don't hesitate to save seeds from hybrids, and I will cross hybrids with other hybrids. This hybrid-of-hybrids zinnia was somewhat "different". That zinnia reminded me a little of a giant dandelion flower. I liked its looks, although some people might reject it as "un-zinnia-like". I tend to agree with the saying that, "beauty is in the eye of the beholder". Your mutant marigold is standing head and shoulders above the marigolds around it. Its tree-trunk-like stem could help it resist damage from strong winds. Who knows what its progeny might look like? It might be an "ugly duckling". ZM

Anyone eating corn for nutrition...be it now or 100 years ago...is "doing nutrition wrong." It's never been a nutrient-dense food as far as vitamins go, though it does have some nutrient quality in the way of carbs and vitamin B. It's a minor, yet noticeable, vitamin A+C contributor to nutrition. Also, the notion that our lines of supersweet corn came from radioactive/mutating experiments is grossly off the mark. Most come from lines of natural selection and breeding by John Laughnan at UI working with a gene most other breeders wouldn't touch. It is a total bastardization of John Laughnan's work (who, unlike what was stated WAS a plant breeder and botanist at U.Illinois) to claim he was by-chance poking around human-mutated "radioactive" corn to make supersweets happen. His work on the sh2 gene is one of the most important breeding pushes in the line of sweet corn. His crossses with Golden Cross Bantam (not to be confused with Golden Bantam which has been around since the early 1900s) for enhanced sweetness are his babies and it was developed with much resistance from his peers because they didn't see the value of the sh2 gene, which usually caused undesirable shrived kernels (because of less starch content and higher sugar content). One of his crosses, Illini Chief, is still sold by Burpee (who developed the initial Golden Bantam, btw), Shumway, and a few other seed sellers over 50 years after it first hit the market. Until his research into this gene it was believed to be a gene that led to inferior product rather than a line worth investigating. When his work led to incorporating the sh2 gene into corn which can produce full/plump kernel cobs, people paid attention. Btw, this was not a 1959 discovery, as stated by the author...he published his initial work on the sh2 gene as a breeding gene worth investigating in 1953 and his work started years earlier. I have no idea where he/she got her information on Dr. Laughnan from, but he/she should check that source again. John Laughnan is a bit of a hero to many in the breeding industry. This kinda pokes me wrong a bit personally to see his name/work trashed like this...and his work cheapened to being some fool who stumbled upon his discovery. It's so off the mark it's insulting. He was far ahead of his time given that supersweets took another 1-2 decades to even become popular in breeding. His work with developing the sh2 gene from a shriveled-kernel "undesirable" gene into a farmer/consumer market changer ranks right up there with Lamborn and Parker's work with the sugar snap pea that led to the "modern" sugar snap we've enjoyed since the 1970s. It was a game changer that went ignored for far too long given the long cultivation history of the plant(s). This post was edited by nc-crn on Sun, May 26, 13 at 20:56

I am already battling virginia creeper, english ivy and northern sea oats! and probably will be fighting trumpet vine soon, and asiatic dayflower, and chameleon plant--all of which I innocently accepted and planted (except the virginia creeper, it just appeared; the ivy was already here). So I'll pass on the chicory--thanks for the warning. My yard is very wet in late winter & spring--my garden area has been built up a bit because of that--but can be quite dry as summer goes on. Does that sound like the conditions Joe-pye weed will like? It looks like a lovely tall plant for the back of the garden. Cydonia33--I looked up the blue mist flower, and I have that! --it was also a volunteer. Another "volunteer" that I have a lot of is a garlicky smelling allium-like plant. I wonder if the seeds of these natives were hiding beneath the top layer and were brought up to germinate when I turned the soil of the "lawn" to make the garden. I dug down 8-14 inches and added materiel to loosen the clay. I ran into a fair amount of trash (broken pottery and glass, a bottle, and such) that deep so I am kind of surprised to get so many flowers. One other thing that came up was a very tall, thick stemmed plant--I let it grow because I thought it might be a sunflower, but when it developed flowers they were more like small ugly dandelions, so I chopped it down and uprooted it. I still don't know what it was--it grew six feet tall!

tracerracer, thank you so much! I googled double tomato flowers and found a study that showed the effects of cold temperatures upon tomato flowers, and I believe this is what happened. We had two nights of lower temperatures right after they were put out. They all weathered it beautifully, but it must have been just enough to disrupt their development. As the plants are quite vigorous right now and have several other blossoms forming, I think I will let these develop and see what happens. Thanks again for your help. :) Here is a link that might be useful: Tomato Flower Abnormalities Induced by Low Temperatures Are Associated with Changes of Expression of MADS-Box Genes