Ways of growing zinnias
I know something about this, having done it most of my life, sometimes even for pay. (Not much pay, but some.)
The first way, the way most people do it—people who know enough about seeds and what happens with them when you add soil, sunlight and water—is this: You open up a patch of soil in spring in a sunny place, clear off the weeds and fork it up a bit, and you dig very shallowly, and you scatter the seeds from the cheapest packet of mixed colors you can find, in rows or over the whole patch, and cover them a bit, and some come up. You will get a surprise—likely a lot of yellow and red and purple, but you might also get pink and white and orange. You water the plants enough to keep them going, possibly every day or several times a week, but each time you do it hurriedly with your thumb over the garden hose, drenching the lower part of the plants themselves or maybe even the flowers, too, as much as you wet the soil. Zinnias are just as forgiving, especially in hot-summer climates like the one they come from, as they are enchanting to children and humans of every age.
The other way takes more time, to do and to describe. You study the seed catalogs that come in January, especially two or three from companies in which you have confidence. You know how much space you’ve got to work with, having prepared the bed in the fall, where it waits under straw or a cover crop, and frost, where it shelters very small animals, where juncos flit early in the morning. You then dog-ear pages of the catalog where you find certain varieties, chosen for their form and color and how they will look together in the garden or a vase. Every evening for a few days you consider your choices and narrow your selections and think of the ratio of ‘Benary’s Giant Salmon Rose’ to ‘Queeny Lime Orange’ and ‘Oklahoma Ivory’. (Because you are nostalgic, you also get 200 seeds of ‘Sunbow Mix’ for that spot by the back steps.)
You place your order, and when it comes you tear open the envelope and arrange all the packets on the kitchen table as you will arrange the seeds in the garden, and the anticipation of those blooms and the feel of their petals—soft above and papery underneath—is, you realize, a lot like getting ready for a date when you’re a teenager. And then into the freezer the seeds go, in a watertight container, labeled with the current year. Now it is February.
All through March and April you go out to the garden and check the soil, and the reason, you have come to understand, is that you love the way it feels and what it does, because it is not really dirt but a mystery made of millions of beings and their leavings. You move a little straw away and pat the ground. You try not to disturb whatever creeping mammal might be living there with its tiny mammalian babies.
In May a day comes “after last frost” or “when soil temperatures reach 60 F” when you put down fresh cardboard and straw or even woven landscape fabric, the kind you can use for 20 years, and you plant the seeds through holes (about half a dozen seeds per hole) in a 1-by-1-foot grid because that will make a nice thick stand but not one so dense that it will encourage powdery mildew later in the season. It’s perfect to plant right before a rain, but if you can’t, you water the seeds with a sprinkler wand (or drip hoses if you’re growing at scale) right away and keep watering every until they germinate (which happens faster than the seed packet says) and keep going until you’ve had two good soaking rains. After that you water if you don’t get a good rain every 10 days, and after the plants are up with two leaves and crowded you thin them to three in a hole then eventually to two and maybe one. When they’re a foot tall you pinch off the top so they branch and later you put some kind of support grid over them so storms or their own weight won’t bring them all down. And you weed them.
Sometime in July or August you have a big laughing patch where people take photos of one another. Whether you plant the first way or the second way.
There are more than two ways of growing zinnias, of course. Some people mix them with other flowers. Some have market gardens or even flower farms. Some water more carefully or more often than others. But all growers of zinnias, I know, even the overworked and underpaid farmers, are getting something for their work, and that thing is joy, because we are talking about zinnias, and zinnias shouldn’t be a luxury, and joy shouldn’t either.