Hungarian Blue Poppies- Seeds to Seedlings

Recently I’ve been drawn to the poppies that produce edible seeds. I love the idea of growing plants that are beautiful, provide food for the bees in our yard, and also produce edible parts! These poppies produce seeds that are used in baking, and can be considered a ‘bread seed poppy’.

We got several packets of these seeds. We sowed one of the packets in a bare ground area, but the rain and squirrels and weeds overtook that area, so I decided to grow them indoor first, even though they recommend outdoor sowing in order to minimize disturbance to their fragile taproot. I figure that I’ll just be careful.

The seeds are a pale blue and quite beautiful, as you can see below:

I used seed starter mix, wet the mixture, sprinkled these seeds on, and then covered with a fine layer of more starter mix. We kept them indoors under 12 hours of light. The temperature in our house is usually a few degrees from 70F.

These seeds were good quality, within 7 days the first seedlings emerged. All the seedlings emerged from seeds that were still light blue in color, suggesting that the brown seeds in the packets were likely duds.

The cotyledons are long and narrow, longer than those on the Lauren’s Grape poppy. The stem is a uniform green color. Some of these seedlings assumed fun shapes while struggling to break free of the seed coat!