This is the 1st half of my "How to Grow Poppies" video. Please be sure to find the 2nd half after watching this one. You'll learn how to germinate seeds properly and plant them in an environment where they will thrive. Here, I show you how to start them indoors in Peat pellets, as well as starting them outdoors both directly into the ground, or in pots. I'll teach you how to avoid birds, slugs, and other techniques to avoid weeds. I also teach about weed block, safe Slug Bait, and soaker hoses.

Video Transcription

Some firms use range in many different colors uh, here we have earned a pure whites which are very light, almost white seed and off white seed and that’s usually for all flowers that are just pure white, the flower is pure white. And then the next color that we arrange into is a darker color than the pure whites and these flowers tend to have white in them that using your mixed with a stripe of either red or pink in the flower as well but they do have white in the flower also. And then moving on to our most common seed is our blue colored seeds which is pretty much representative of almost all that Somniferum poppies out there from your lavenders to your blues and purples. And then we have a very dark, reddish—well, the flowers on these are mostly pure red or maybe a really dark purple like our black clouds or the wizard of Oz reds and this colored seed is more dark, dark brown. Let’s move on to planting them. Now in some situations I like to use peat pellets and those are these teeny pellets that expand when you put in water in them I like to open up the tops a little wider so I have a larger growing area. And I’ll take my seed and kind of sprinkle a few in there and ill pack them in. Pack them in so that retains the moisture once the moisture comes. Now you don’t want to water from the top, you’re going to want to put water in this into the tray from the bottom. that way the seed will seek moisture below and the root will seat will start to grow down below and these will sprout anywhere from a week to two weeks depending on temperatures light or the conditions and now what you would you do is take these and put them in your final place for planting. Now, once you seeds sprout, you want to take your peat pellet, stick it into a—I’ve got soil all under here, this is all the earth and I put weed block down around it and tuck holes and I’ve got soaker hoses in there that will also water them and once they start sprouting, you can leave a few in each pellet. And as they get bigger you want to, you want to thin, thin out the smaller, weaker ones. And when I say thin, I just mean kill, just pull them out the and you should just want to leave one or two to each pellet so that later when it gets older, it becomes, it will eventually grow into a little bit bigger plant and this one it got copper tape around it for the slugs. But be careful slugs and birds, birds will eat the seed before they sprout, slugs will eat the sprouts once they sprout. Now you don’t want to plant all your seeds in one basket, is what I like to say, like I said, depending on where the seed you got, grew and what the climate was there will depend on how it grows where you live. Now you might want to start some indoors with peat pellets the way I just showed and then transfer them outside. Now you do run the risk of them stunting if they ,some for some reason depending on the temperature of the season and were you are, some, sometimes copies get stunted when you bring them outdoors from the indoors, they just stop growing for some reason. So sometimes I like to plant them in pots with this, like a garden fabric you can buy that. That actually has pores in that would let water in. And then, this will protect it from birds eating the seeds and slugs and will start sprouting up here, you get a bunch of little sprouts here going and that's just a couple weeks. And that's also what I did with this big bin here, I also put some cover on it when these were sprouting and now they’re getting a little older and bigger. Now you do run a risk when you plant in pots. For some reason there are certain types of poppies depending on their strain or where they originated from or what kind of soil they would grow in from the person who you grew it before you would depend on how they do in pots. Some don't do well in pots, some will stop growing do growth will be stunted.