If you follow along here at Pumpjack & Piddlewick, you know that I am restoring a little walled medieval garden. Long neglected and overgrown, slowly it is turning into a bountiful harvest garden. And it turns out this includes opium poppies.
The concept in the garden is to manage what I plant, and more or less let everything else run amok. The organic and biodynamic wineries I visit have been teaching me that weeds are good, and often have many uses. They tell us a lot about what is going on in the garden. So, unless the weed is affecting something I plant, it gets to stay.
Popping up Poppies
So as spring turned towards summer, there were these strange plants popping up all over my garden. A quick check with my Plantnet app and I discovered they were opium poppies, otherwise known as the breadseed poppy.
I also have the classic poppy popping up, too. The difference? The classic, called the Flanders poppy, is the red leafed flower. The opium poppy has a purple flower, and is much fancier. And in fact, as their blooms start to unfurl, it seems I have two types of opium poppies, some with double petals.
Live and Let Live
Opium poppies grow to be quite big plants. With multiple long stalks and rather spiky alien looking leaves. The flower/seed pod hangs its head as it grows, until suddenly one day it lifts, unfurls its beautiful purple paper thin petals to the sun. They are truly dramatic in their design.
The blooming is very short lived for each flower, with the petals detaching and wafting to the ground. But luckily there are multiple pods and they mature at different times, so the plant continuously blooms, a flower or three at a time. Until suddenly it is done. And then we wait…
A Breadseed by Any Other Name
Of course when I first discovered that these weird plants growing in my garden were opium poppies, I truly wondered what the previous owner of my home had gotten up to. An elderly gentleman, I have to deduce it was more likely these flowers were grown for their seeds, not their potential narcotic making opportunity. (Which in researching is seriously convoluted and I had to wonder at how someone figured out how to do it!)
I first truly discovered poppy seeds in the UK, where they are used quite a lot in baking and bakeries. In the US, they are particularly popular on bagels. They are sometimes, and more often by bakers given the drug linkage, referred to as breadseeds. Also maw seeds, though weirdly I thought people were saying Moore seeds in pronunciation. And until researching this post thought that was what they were called.
Time to Forage
So discovering I had opium poppies and that these were also the plants that offered up breadseeds, I duly decided to harvest them. I love poppy seeds, so having a free option of many many seeds was a no brainer.
You have to wait until the plant effectively dies and dries. It goes from a sort of pale green to a chalky tan. The leaves become more paperlike, and the seed pods more solid. What you want is for the seed pod to dry out sufficiently that it opens up little holes at the top of the pod. Once this occurs, you cut the stalk to the pod and can literally shake the pod, like a rattle, and the seeds fall out the holes.
If you wish to see, this is the video that showed me how,
Duly Done
I shook my little rattles over a bowl and collected thousands upon thousands of seeds. Left overnight so any creepy crawlies could escape, they were then put into jars. I am not a big baker, so will keep only 1 jar for myself. The rest I will gift to neighbours for not ratting out my opium poppy growing to ‘le flic‘. (Actually it’s not illegal to grow opium poppies in France in your garden, as long as they are obviously not hugely abundant, e.g. you are farming for nefarious purposes.)
And in case you are wondering, why I would let opium poppies grow and re-seed in my garden? Besides the obvious beauty of the flowers, the seeds are rich in nutrients, antioxidants and especially high in manganese. Good for the heart and bone health, something to consider as I get older. And, well, they are really tasty too.
More Gardening
If you are a beginner gardener, or simply interested to learn more about gardening in France, check out my further discoveries in Garden Findings.
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