Poppies to Poppies

See the little hard brown seed casings clinging to the very tips of these brand new poppy sprouts?

I picked each one by hand.

My poppy garden has been one of my great pleasures the last few years. It's a collection of established plants rescued from discount shelves in gardening centers because they were too run down to sell at full price and ones I grew from a grocery store seed packet. Those pink and sorbet-colored guys above? Those are ones I grew from seed, and if you look a little more closely you'll see those green bean-ish shaped tubes among them. 

Those funny duders are seed pods, gestating the next generation of grocery store poppies.

Last season I harvested them, letting them dry out for weeks until they were brittle enough to explode their hard little round pellets across my studio floor all on their own. Later I learned you're supposed to put them in a paper bag, so their little seed explosions will be contained.

I'm learning all of this as I go-- usually after I've posted a photo online sharing my newest discovery or development (or disaster), and then somebody reaches out to tell me there's a name for that thing or there's an established way to avoid/entice a specific outcome or if I just actually googled any of this all of the relevant information is available at my fingertips. But what's the fun in that?

The intact pods I shelled with my finger tips and a pokey stick to dislodge every seed from its row. I gathered them up— I searched the floor for any escapees who had sproinged or rolled away (the most efficient way to pick them up was to press them into the pad of my finger, where they’d remain embedded just long enough to be lifted and deposited elsewhere)— and I poured them into tiny little airtight containers that I tucked into my gardening tools drawer until this spring.

Some seeds I sent to friends, the rest I planted here. Did you know you only need to press them into pre-watered soil? You don’t need to actually bury them. I only learned that this year, when I was looking for the right dates to plant poppies in the Pacific Northwest- a first, for me. Normally I just throw seeds in the ground and hope for the best, but this time I actually wanted to maximize their growth/happiness.

I see each new poppy growing and I know where it came from, what it felt like as a hard little pellet pressed into the soft pad of my thumb. "I could stare at my plants for hours," I told Matt as I came in from a lightning quick watering of my garden the other day. "And you do" He laughed, because I had easily already spent an hour an a half out there already and I hadn't even realized it.