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Perfect for gardening enthusiasts at any level, this podcast is your companion to cultivating success and beauty in your own backyard or flower patch. Hosted by Jane Westoby from Fuchsia Blooms Florist and The Hampshire Seed Company.
Each episode is a treasure trove of practical tips, expert advice, and insider flower farming guides designed to help you sow and grow with confidence and harvest with pride. Whether you’re dreaming of rows of neat vegetables or cutting flowers for bouquets all year round, we’ll walk you through every step.
Let’s grow together!
Jane Westoby (00:03)
Hey there flower friends and welcome back to the podcast that believes that flowers should be local, seasonal and grown with love, not wrapped in plastic and flown halfway across the world. I'm Jane, the founder of the Hampshire Seed Company and a flower farmer florist who's gone from wedding chaos to seed packet chaos. And these days I help other growers to build blooming good.
businesses and gardens. So whether you are planting your first row of cosmos or you're scaling up for some serious sales, you're in the right place. Now it's the new year and I kind of can't believe that it's 2026 already. So firstly, happy new year. we are now, well, my business is almost two years old now and this podcast
is a year old so I launched it a year ago this month. Now I know that well we've done we've done a lot of episodes
So we've done 31 episodes so far as of me recording this. And I know that's not technically one a week. So I do have a bit of a break now and again. So I give myself four to six weeks off a couple of times a year. And that's really just to catch up and just recuperate slightly because they do take a long time to record and edit, et cetera. So.
apologies if you expect them every week. My intention is to do them every week and I would love to be able to do them every week but it is time permitting. So that's why we don't quite have the 52 but I tend to record them in batches. So here we go again it's January as I'm recording this and I'm getting really really excited for the new season for the new
growing season and I have started growing already and we've launched our grow alongs as well again so we had a series of autumn winter grow alongs which I launched back in I would say it was probably beginning at kind of end of August beginning of September last year which was all about hardy annuals and what to grow and overwinter for really early blooms the following year so that was all about hardy annuals and I'd say probably hardy perennials as well there's some hardy perennials in there too.
So those grow alongs are all live and on the site and if you want access to those I will pop the link in the show notes for those. But they were so popular that I've decided to do a spring series of grow alongs as well. So they have they have already started.
we started with a repeat actually we started with sweet peas and the reason we started with sweet peas is because they should be succession sowed and they can be succession sowed. If you sow some in autumn they will start flowering as long as you do everything right they will start flowering from May onwards and when in May depends on weather conditions so how warm it is and it depends on if you have a greenhouse.
So if you can get them in the greenhouse nice and early and you've got nice sunny weather, you can and you live in a warmer part of the country, let's say, because there's a huge difference between growing on the south coast of England and growing in Scotland, let's say. So I am on the south coast of England. I know I can get blooms in, I'd say probably the first week of...
May, maybe the second week of May, just weather dependent, but certainly by mid May we can have flowers on our sweet peas down here in the south of England if we sow them in autumn. You can also spring sow them and this was one of my most popular grow alongs last year and I also recorded a podcast all about sweet peas and sweet pea growing last year as well.
And again, this was one of my most popular podcasts.
It was actually episode number seven. So it's really, really early on. It was the 23rd of February, but it was a kind of a real special last minute episode. And really it was based on the fact that I saw so many people and so many comments across social media talking about leggy sweet peas and what you could do to avoid that. And that's essentially why I recorded that episode.
And it's one of the main reasons actually why I started to do the autumn grow alongs because I could see that people were trying to grow their sweet peas inside, indoors on the windowsill. And that is not what sweet peas like at all. So if you want access to the sweet pea grow along, then I'll put the link to the sweet pea grow along in the show notes for you as well.
and to the podcast as well. So you can access both of those.
But this week I've been sewing poppies out in the garden. No greenhouse required. And that is, that's the beauty of growing Hardy annuals.
and of growing poppies because I'd say on the whole poppies shouldn't be sowed in trays and they should be sowed direct out in the garden. But the thing to remember is not all poppies are the same. So today I'm gonna take you through some of my grow along and blog information so that you can really understand how poppies grow.
So there are a few different types of poppies. So you get your annual poppies, which are the Papaver Somniferum. These are your breed seed poppies and your giant poppies, the Gigantiums, which I absolutely love. I sow these, well, I sow them in my garden because the flowers are.
absolutely pretty so the antique is one of my favorites I must say and the peony types are my favorites as well especially the black one that's a really really lovely one. So I do grow them in the garden for the flowers but I don't necessarily grow these as a flower farmer for the flowers because let's be honest the flowers don't actually last they're very very fleeting but what I do grow them for as a flower farmer is for the seed pods.
and the seed pods on the breed seed are quite, I'd say they're quite large. I mean, if I was to get my ruler out, let me reach over, I will get my ruler out on some memory. I mean, I would say a typical seed pod for a typical breed seed poppy will be maybe three to four centimeters, but it won't be any bigger than that. I'd say, yeah, three to four centimeters. But for a guy,
The Giganteum Poppy, the seed pods are a good, I'd say, seven centimeters in diameter. So they are enormous, they're huge. And whether you are growing just the regular breed seed poppies or whether you are growing the Giganteum ones, they both look amazing in arrangement. And because you can store them and keep them, you can then use them all winter long.
You can use them into the next year. So in terms of bang for buck, they're actually a really, really good flower to grow because you can save them and there's no wastage there. So they're the first type. Now the second type are the field poppies or the, it's the papaver roheus. So the field poppies, the corn poppies are the kind of wild type styles. So these are, they are really beautiful. They're really, they're really,
pretty Pandora is one of my favourite ones of those. They're really wildlife friendly because they have the open centres but they're not really used in cutting because the seed pods are really really small and have really fragile stems. Now having said that I have actually used them for flower arranging as well. If I'm making something really really delicate so a really delicate bouquet or some boutonniers maybe I will sometimes use
a really tiny little poppy seed head from a kind of wild poppy or a corn poppy because that does look really really pretty but generally they're for the garden let's say okay and then the third type is the nudicals the Icelandic poppies and these are
and these you would absolutely grow for cutting. So, and for the garden as well, obviously, but these are amazing used in the springtime because you can sow them in the late summer or early spring and they really do benefit from cool conditions and they produce really good usable stems for cutting. And then the last type are the true
Perennial poppies. Okay, so these are the the oriental poppies. So these are really deep rooted. They flower once a year. They die back after flowering But they do come back every year, but they were short-lived perennial So they'll maybe last like five years something like that three to five years But you unless you isolate them really well You won't be able to grow those some seed, but you can grow them actually
from root cuttings and I will do a post about that. I'll do a blog and I'll show you how to do that later on in the season. I think I already have one those anyway so I'll post that for you. So there are the different types and the perennial poppies you wouldn't use the seed pods. The seed pods aren't really that usable for the perennial poppies but the flowers in the garden are absolutely stunning, really, really stunning.
So the thing with poppies is that they actually don't like root disturbance. So the best way to actually sow poppies is direct outside in the garden. So the breed seed poppies I would sow over winter and you can broadcast sow them and you may have seen my video this week, I'll link to it in the show notes for you so you can see how I sow them and you can literally just scatter them in the garden.
the top of the soil and when the weather warms they will germinate. So you mustn't sow them too thickly because you don't want too many coming up and you cannot prick them out and this is the main thing to remember with poppies because they hate that root disturbance you can't prick them out so just make sure you sow them nice and thinly not too thick.
And then if you're a flower farmer, can sow them in rows. Now I sow quite thick rows, maybe 10, 20 centimeters, and then have maybe a bit of a gap in between and then do another row, another kind of 10 centimeters or so, and sow them in rows. And the thing about sowing in rows is it means you can weed and you can see the weeds coming up because you know that all of your poppies are all in rows.
And that just makes it easier for cutting. anything in a row, if you're a flower farmer, anything in a row is easier to cut. But just the garden purposes, you would just broadcast, them. So you really shouldn't be doing that. So you really shouldn't be sowing them in pots. Direct in the garden is perfect. But there is one caveat to this Icelandic poppies. So Icelandic poppies, I do sow in
trays or kind of deep rooted trays, the little cell trays that you get and I make sure that I only sow a few seeds in to each cell and then they never get pricked out. They stay in that cell. I might pull a few out if there's too many in that cell and it's too overcrowded I will pull some out and I'll leave maybe two or three in each cell and then when the roots have
and started to hit the sides of that cell, I know that they're ready to then transplant out into the garden. And I will very, very gently take them out of those cell trays and plant them into the garden direct. No kind of pricking out, no handling the roots.
And I even sometimes use a cocktail stick to make sure that I don't get too many in there. Okay. So if you want to grow Icelandic poppies, I'd say they are, they can be tricky to grow, especially in the cell trays, because you need to be careful that you don't wash them away. And again, I have a grow along for growing Icelandic poppies. I'll link to that in the show notes for you. So if you want to grow those, then you absolutely can. So the other thing to remember with
with poppies is that they really like cool conditions. So typically they like about 10 to 15 degrees C and they will struggle in excessive warmth. So this just makes them really well suited to autumn winter sewing or an early spring sewing rather than on heated propagators essentially.
So just take away from today that poppies are easy to grow. You don't necessarily need a greenhouse, but you do need to choose the right poppy suited to what you actually want to grow for. So whether you're growing for your garden or whether you're growing for cut flower use, you choose the different types of poppy. Also take away that they don't like the root disturbance as well. So sow them direct and you don't need a greenhouse. They are.
the most fantastic, fantastic flower that is just really, really easy to grow.
So that's it for this week until next week.
Happy sowing, happy growing. will put all of the links into the show notes for you. So do go and take a look and I'll see you next time.