How to grow poppies
Grow them from lightly scattered seed or bare-root plants
FROM BARE-ROOT PLANTS
Oriental poppies are sometimes sold as bare-root plants and can be committed to the earth right now. Check there is no sign of rotting – mushy roots can spread the rot, so snip off any that are soft or soggy. Hopefully, all that you will need to then do is trim any overlong roots that won’t fit in a planting hole around 15cm deep. Choose an open site. Weed soil thoroughly and incorporate blood, fish and bonemeal before planting. Trim off any faded leaves and ensure that the crown (where roots meet leaves) is level with the surface of the soil after planting. Space the plants 30-45cm apart to allow them room to grow. ( See page 14 for our Free For Every Reader bare-root poppies offer.)
FROM SEED
The opium poppies and annual cornfield poppies, plus the Shirley varieties that sprang from them, are easy to grow in light, well-cultivated soil. Simply scatter the seeds over the surface of crumbly, weed-free soil and lightly rake them in. There is no need to cover them deeply. Sow in autumn (early November is not too late if the weather is mild) to give seedlings a chance to establish themselves more rapidly than if sown in spring, and they will be less likely to dry out during germination. Sow thinly! Autumn sowing also leads to earlier flowering and your poppies will bloom from May or June onwards into August. My spring-sown plants were still flowering in September. Eschscholzia is best sown in a patch of sunny earth in April for flowering that summer. Technically a perennial, it will sometimes survive from year to year, but it has the capacity to flower rapidly from seed and so we usually treat it as an annual. Sow the blue meconopsis poppy on the surface of seed compost in late summer or autumn and overwinter seedlings in a cold frame. Prick them out into ericaceous compost and grow on before planting out in cool, leafy soil. Perennial meconopsis can be divided and replanted in spring.