Z is for Zazzy Zinnia

Note: my latest article is up which shows my raised bed garden in bloom!
Part 10: Dreams of a Big Flower Garden: An Explosion of Color!!

I have finally arrived at the last letter of the alphabet, and this is one of the beautiful Zinnias that have bloomed in my garden! By the way, "zazzy" is slang which means, "a basic cross between zany, pizazz and snazzy to create an adjective suggesting that something is too great to be confined to one word."

I have three sections devoted to Zinnias, each with a different kind. This section has Dwarf Zinnias, and I was really surprised to find that about two dozen seeds germinated for me. The plants took off like wildfire...that is, until Cucumber Beetles discovered them. The insects ate many of them down to the ground, and severely damaged the others. I had been so excited and happy because all of the sections of Zinnias were doing so well, and within a couple of days I lost many of them and was facing the death of all of them. I was desperate. Though the chili-garlic spray I was using worked a little bit, the seedlings continued to be damaged. I finally tried a insect powder which I sprinkled onto the leaves and it worked! Finally my Zinnias were left alone, and to my amazement, many of the seedlings that were basically dead came back and are now creating buds! Hooray!!

My Dwarf Zinnias are almost all shades of pink, but there's one orange-red one too, and there are others yet to begin blooming, so there may be other colors as well. I'm so happy to share my first Zinnia flower with all of you, grown from a tiny seed, and what a nice picture to end my Alphabet project with!

Explored on July 21, highest placement: #1.