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Unreliable seed, seed saving, hand-pollinating/breeding cosmos ...
in Plants
Yes I struggled with a title as I have a few related queries going round my head, sorry!
First off, I've only been gardening a couple of years, and both this year and last I purchased cosmos seeds where the flowers have turned out very different from the named cultivar. Last year I tried to grow fizzy purple and ended up with what looks like fizzy rose picotee. This year I tried to grow double-click cranberry but have ended up with plants with magenta single flowers. It's pretty frustrating as I plant them in a certain position to work with the other plants and then up with something completely different.
First off, I've only been gardening a couple of years, and both this year and last I purchased cosmos seeds where the flowers have turned out very different from the named cultivar. Last year I tried to grow fizzy purple and ended up with what looks like fizzy rose picotee. This year I tried to grow double-click cranberry but have ended up with plants with magenta single flowers. It's pretty frustrating as I plant them in a certain position to work with the other plants and then up with something completely different.
I know this sometimes happens with the wrong seed being supplied, but is there a particular problem with cosmos cross pollination and their seeds being particularly unreliable or have I been unlucky? I would really like to try fizzy purple again next year, but I don't know if it's worth another go only to be disappointed with wishy washy pastel flowers.
Also, I do quite like the magenta ones that have grown this year, and also a magenta and white striped one that self-seeded and I'm guessing may have been a cross between the picotee and a magenta plant from last year's 'dwarf' sensation cosmos (not actually dwarf
). I'm very much enjoying collecting my own seed generally and would like to try to grow these again next year. But as I am growing multiple types - the Not Doubleclick Cranberry, Rubenza, and volunteers from last year's plants, I'm guessing the resulting plants will be quite unpredictable?

If I wanted to try to grow plants similar to the parents can I isolate flowers in a bag before they're fully open and then hand pollinate them? I have multiple plants of the magenta but just one striped one - can I pollinate with flowers from the same plant? If I can keep that one going I quite fancy crossing the striped one with different coloured cosmos down the line just to see what I get. I do like unpredictability but I like to be able to predict when and where the unpredictability will happen. 

I know that's a lot of questions, but if anyone could offer a few tips or point me towards a useful info source, I'd be really grateful. I did try googling only to discover that breeding cosmos is a task in the video game, Animal Crossing, and it was very hard to find anything related to real world plants. 

Sussex coast
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When you don't even know who's in the team
S.Yorkshire/Derbyshire border
When you don't even know who's in the team
S.Yorkshire/Derbyshire border