Poppies

[igenlode]

The California poppies have opened :-)
They are a bright orange-yellow that is close to the colour of the pot-marigolds, but not quite the same.

Embarrassingly, it turns out that there are *two* vigorous plants with slightly different foliage shooting upwards from in the middle of the dill seedlings (which are understandably suffering from the competition), either one of which could, from the one photo I have, be the missing Cumbrian yellow poppy -- I shall have to wait for one or other of them to send up a poppy-seed-head before I can possibly tell!

I don't believe that any of the various seedlings which germinated in the two seed compartments where I sowed yellow poppy seed are, in fact, yellow poppies -- I think they are all either field or oriental poppies that happened to germinate out of the disturbed soil. The oriental poppies at least are fairly distinctive once they start to get their adult leaves.
On the other hand, I have a suspicion that a yellow poppy *may* be among the various things that have germinated around my garlic shoot (which, like all its predecessors, isn't doing very well; I don't know if it is developing cloves down below, but it has certainly stopped growing up above).

I really need to pot up those seed compartments full of field and oriental poppies respectively -- or possibly simply to throw the latter away, cruel as it seems, since I have so many that have self-sown elsewhere :-( (I didn't get any field poppies successfully to seed last year, so it might be worth trying to nurture some of those deliberately.)

I did get round to potting up the mesembryanthemums -- not only did the original few turn out to be genuine succulent seedlings after all but, as happened last year, there was a second late-germinating flush, and since there were no disasters this year I now have quite a number of plump little plants. Albeit some of them are *very* little...
Forewarned by past experience, I have put the most advanced ones into a wide shallow tray where they can sprawl around all they like without any danger of falling over the edge. One of the biggest two did in fact flop a couple of days ago, and forewarned by past experience I didn't worry about it at all and it continued growing in a recumbent position ;-)

But they really do have almost no root at all, as I discovered when repotting -- a ridiculously short and tiny thread in comparison to the rest of the plant. I suppose that comes of storing all their water in their leaves. The poppy seedlings seem to have surprisingly little root either.

I have potted on the 'pink' Swan River daisies, and really need to pot up the normal ones (which are several weeks behind due to the failure of the first batch). I have also potted up a second batch of towel-tomatoes into a large pot, which gives me six of those and three of the heritage tomatoes -- probably still too many (I think I had five towel-tomatoes and two magazine-tomatoes last year, and the former were very crowded). I still have five more towel-tomato seedlings which I mean to give away if I can get them to a decent size :-)