This is the 2nd 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

Now here's an example of poppies that are doing really well in pots. There’re some pots all along here. These are all potted poppies and they are doing great. They’re blooming. So some strains will do fine in pots with certain types of soils and some wont. When you give your poppies plenty of room to grow, they’ll get big. Now, talking about it, pretty large leaves here, so when you give them enough room and the right kind of soil in the right condition, and enough sunlight, they love sunlight, pure direct sunlight, they’ll do really well. This is the same strain of seed, planted at the same time that this plant was planted. Same exact seed planted at the same exact time. They’re both the same age, it’s just that one, liked where it was planted the others didn’t. Nature is very complex and it decides what it wants them to do when. I always suggest, finding and planting in a variety of different ways and places using a variety of mediums so you’re sure to give a successful copy plant from your plantings. Start some indoors, some outdoors. Peat pellets, rose and that way you’re sure to get success. Here’s a good example of a poppy in the cabbage stage, well its just about to flower, so it’s just getting into its flowering stage but, you can always tell some firm poppies apart because they have very smooth surrogated leaves, almost bluish in color if you compare it to something next to it. It’s something that’s green or, well there’s another poppy right there but, it got a bluish tint to it. They don’t have any fur on the leaves whatsoever, of course there’s some fur walking by right there. The oregano poppies have a fur-like substance on the leaf and on the pod but this has no fur, and the only poppy that doesn’t have fur somni fur. Now here’s a quick maturing, strain I got from Canada. Now this picture is in about 55 days. Now what happens is once the, once the poppy flowers, the petal will usually stand for about 48 hours or so and then they’ll drop away. You can see there’s a bunch of pollen here, and they can self pollinate pretty easily but these can also cross-pollinate them. Here the petals are coming off right here. Now, if these, you know, get some pollen from this pollen and they bring the pollen over and they fly onto this one while this is flowering, and touch the top there, well then you’re going to get a cross-pollinated seed from this pot between these two types. And what happens after the petals fall off, is this center part will keep growing and expanding for about two weeks until it gets about this size, a little bigger to have a kind of a blue tint, if you could see as I rub this, you could see how I rub the way that this bluish tint that it has. So to harvest the seed, what you want to do is wait until the pod, you’re going to want to leave the pod on the, in the ground, on the plant, until it turns brown and starts rattling and that’s when the seeds will be ready. And here’s what the finished pods look like when they, after you’ve harvested the seed or before It’s hard, here’s another one, it’s hard and its got little holes, little vents on the top sometimes those vents open naturally and sometimes, they take a little poking to open. But you can poke them and it still looks natural and gets the seed out without having a drill hole on the top. But one of these pods will hold hundreds of thousands of seeds for plenty years to come.