Blog: Poppy Pods

4:10 pm was the second time I heard the crack of a drying pod case split open, followed by the sound of tiny round poppy seeds raining down and bouncing off the floor below. KTSH-tk-tk-tk-tk.

I collect them from my little poppy flowers after the petals have fallen off, leaving behind those absurd, almost obscene, extending seed tubes that just continue to grow longer and longer.

They shouldn’t remind me of Gonzo’s nose (on account of the fact that they’re neither curled nor blue) but, what can I say, they do. They’ve got Big Gonzo’s Nose Energy to me.

It’s hard making myself wait to cut them down when the flowers first disintegrate. The longer I can leave them be, the bigger the pod will grow, producing healthier seeds.

I rarely ever actually give them enough time to fully mature. When I walk around the neighborhood, I can see that the poppy pods in other gardens absolutely eclipse mine, no contest. They’re at least two thirds longer and already dried out while still on the stem. Mine are green when I cut them down.

Hopefully that’s ok. I mean, they still do their thing when I bundle them upside down together and hang them to dry from my home studio shelf.

(They’re on the far right, just before the big bundle of fake red and yellow flowers that are covering the end of my thin, white shelf. There’s too much on my wall to really see them in this picture, but I just wanted to show you the room that I hang them in when I make my little harvests. This used to be my back-up office, for when I couldn’t bus downtown to my desk at Helioscope because I was too sick or had to work over the weekend. Now I work here every day, drawing boner comics in this house addition that is slowly but steadily sinking into the earth because some previous owners built it on foundations that are not as stable as the rest of our 100+ year old house. I like this room. The sunlight fills it up and the giant horizontal crack across the entire length of the south-facing wall gives it character as the sinking causes it to grow fatter every year.)

Oh, right.

The poppy pods.

At 5:28 pm, a third one popped.

5:45 pm, a fourth.

5:50 pm, the fifth.

I took the hint and brought down my little bundles to properly harvest their seeds.

I mean, I say “properly”, but I don’t actually know that for sure. I never Googled it. I just split the pods open and scrape out the little round pellets inside onto some paper and pour that into little bead storage containers that I got at a craft store, back when you could still casually go shopping just for fun.

A few of the pods were still too soft, so I’m leaving them to keep drying. Something really delights me about the look of those dried out pod-connector caps all clustered together. It looks like some kind of undersea coral or the close-up of a virus under a microscope.

The Internet says December and January are the good poppy planting times, but honestly I’m probably going to try my luck now anyway because every day feels the same and I miss hugging my friends.

I’ve collected and harvested many bundles of pods like this over the last month or so, and my slutty little flowers just keep making more, so I’ll keep it up until they run out, I guess.

They have to run out at some point.

Now you just have to look at pictures of my poppy patch. Sorry.

I’ve started working on a teeny tiny project in my flower garden to raise funds for The Black Resilience Fund. You folks here will be the first to know when it’s ready ❤️