poppies harvesting

Poppy Pods Dutch Oval Poppy Pods Tasmanian Poppy Pods Turkish Poppy Pods Giganthemum Poppy Pods All Poppy Pods Poppy Seeds Oriental Poppy Seeds All Poppy Seeds

poppies

To order call:
1-800-618-8308

Customer Login:

User Name:

Password:

Poppies Harvesting

WITH TIMOTHY O’BRIEN
“My classmates and I, a group of advanced Biology students from St. Paul University in Minnesota visited a small town located a few miles from Des Moines, Iowa. At first, we thought we were visiting a one-horse town, we were absolutely wrong; it was an industrious town with a high employment rate. When we were getting out the school bus early in the morning, all of us, were stunned with the sight. We saw acres of a beautiful carpet with all kind of colors; the emerging sunlight did its part to complete the amazing scene. We hardly had time to leave our luggage, we immediately were walking through the “beautiful carpet”, our professor left the group in Timothy O’Brien hands; he was the person in charge, Mr. O’Brien wanted us to have first hand practice and knowledge. What a hands-on training we had!

Timothy O’Brien was rough but he liked to explain what he knew about poppies harvesting, he got to the point immediately. After a walk through poppies field, he said: “Look, this is a poppy with a mature pod, if the points of the pod’s crown are standing straight out or are curved upward, the pod is ready to be scored. If the crown’s points turn downward, the pod may not yet be fully matured. Not all the plants in a field will be ready for scoring at the same time. You can call it “scoring of the pods”, you can also name this as lancing, incising, or tapping; the scoring begins about 2 weeks after the flower petals fall from the pods. See? This flower’s petals are on the floor. You must examine the pod and the tiny crown portion on the top of the pod very carefully before scoring. Each pod can be tapped from two to four times. No more.”

The next day Mr. O’Brien gave us some technical tips. He explained to us: “A set of three or four small blades of iron, or glass splinters bound tightly together on a wooden handle is used to score two or three sides of the pod in a vertical direction. If the blades cut too deep into the wall of the pod, the opium, or latex if you want to call it that way, will drain inside the pod, rather than to the surface, where you can collect it. If the incisions are not deep, the flow will be too slow and the opium will coagulate over the incisions and block the flow. A depth of 1 millimeter more or less, is desirable for the incision. Try to use a blade-tool designed to cut that depth, ideal scoring starts in late afternoon so the white latex-like raw opium, which has a 60 percent water content, can ooze out and slowly dry on the surface of the pod overnight.”