Growing poppies from seed

Yesterday I visited a friend who had some lovely deep pink poppies growing in her border. She pulled a couple of the green seedpods off for me to take home. What should I do with these seedpods? Wait until they burst open and then plant the seeds in pots, or cut the pods open and sow them now?

 

Let them dry, when they are ripe, small holes will open at the top of the pods and the seeds will shake out.

If you cut them open now, they will still be green and wet.

 

Hi Showersinmay and welcome to the forum.

I would pop the seed pod into a paper bag and put it somewhere warm and dry so that the seeds can dry out inside and fall from the seed pod,then they can either be sprinkled onto some soil in the garden where they should germinate or you can keep them for sowing next year.

I myself always wait until the seed pods on my poppy plants have turned brown and the little holes have formed and opened at the top of the pod,then I either cut them off of the main flowering spike to be dried off or I gently shake the pods so that the seeds fall out onto the ground where they can germinate as and when they are ready.

If you do decide to sow them you could surface sow them in pots of compost and then when they have germinated prick them out and grow them on but I myself have never found this to be a good way of growing them and ended up losing the plants as they didn't like being disturbed so now I just do the sprinkling of them and have no problem growing them.I usually find also that the seeds don't do much at all until the autumn,then they start to germinate and come up like cress in the borders.:D

 

Good question. I have no probs with P Orientalis, cambrica and somniferum (orientals, welsh and opium in plain English) and there's a weedy orange one that seeds around, too. I would love to grow swathes of Californium poppies but they just won't, in my garden, no matter what I do. I grew Shirleys in a pot last year but they failed to self-seed afterwards. Anybody know why that is?

Also, with regard to the above posts, will a seed head ripen if cut off while it is still green? I thought I had to leave it on the plant in order to ripen it.

 

How easy is it to grow them from seeds? I have 2 different types of Meconopsis cambrica (different type of leaves) which I have gotten quite a lot of seeds from.. and I've saved them up in little bags, so I'd like to have a go at growing at least one plant from them.

 

Extremely easy - when they want to. I have M cambrica everywhere but some people say they can't get it established. So I'd like to know what factors encourage/discourage them.

 

There's an alleyway near my house where there's probably 20 of them down the side of someone's house.. so I'm guessing they like very dry areas.. and I doubt there's even much soil where they have grown.