Time to start dreaming of poppies

Want big plants fast? This kind of thinking is usually out of reach for dirt cheap gardeners and left to those who can buy mature shrubs and perennials and “install” them into heavily amended soil.   But there are a few annuals that can fulfill this desire for very little cost and breadseed poppies are one of them.

Lauren's Grape Poppy

You might wonder why I’m talking about poppies now, at the beginning of the winter. But this is a great time to scatter breadseed poppy seed (Papaver somniferum) on the ground for spring bloom. They are incredibly easy to grow….just scratch some garden soil a bit where you want them to root and scatter the seed lightly across the ground.  You don’t need to bury or cover the seed and in the Spring you’ll be rewarded with huge plants and spectacular blooms and lovely grey/green lettuce-like foliage. They prefer good drainage and full sun, and are particularly excited about growing in gravel.

This poppy seed was mixed in with Lauren's Grape seed from a gardener friend...what a great surprise!

I used them in a new gravel garden in my parking strip last spring, and although I hadn’t put in many perennials yet, these annual poppies made the garden look full and showy during it’s first season.  Breadseed poppies are not the same as oriental poppies (Papaver orientale) or california poppies (Eschscholzia californica).  They are an annual, grow quite tall (five feet!) and have fat stems and seedpods, and big vegetable-looking leaves.  Plan for them to take up some space, although most of it is vertical, and you can trim off lower leaves to leave light and space for plants beneath them.

Once you sow annual breadseed poppies you will never need to buy seed again.  They produce vast quantities of seed that can easily be collected from the dried pods–enough to supply you and all your friends all the poppies you can grow.  Seed can be hard to find through catalogs, but is usually available through heirloom seed catalogs like Select Seeds.  Ask around to see if any of your friends are growing it or join a group like Seed Savers Exchange or a local Plant Swap group to find seed.  Starts can also be transplanted into the garden in Spring (and I always see them here, both at nurseries and farmer’s markets) but they never do quite as well as those direct seeded, and they cost more!  Annie’s Annuals is a good source of mail-order breadseed poppy plants.

And yes, this is the same plant that produces opium, but it is still legal to grow as long as you aren’t growing vast commercial fields of the stuff.  I did lose a few seedheads (which are highly decorative in their own right) to sidewalk passerby during the growing season, presumably someone who thought they might make some old fashioned morphine.  For a fascinating discussion of the whole poppy growing/opium connection and the politics of gardening check out Michael Pollan’s essay in Harper’s Opium Made Easy.