I agree with Ken, in principle. However, the longer the seeds sit out on the ground, the more chance they have of being eaten or washed away or forgotten and mulched over and dug into. I'd try to wait until at least late fall. Though, if you have plenty of seed, planting them now might allow some to germinate immediately and put down enough roots to have a head start next spring. I'm not being very helpful, am I? There's probably no absolutely correct answer. Martha

I've gone mad for poppies but have found 2 kinds of seeds that will be similar to the one I want most now. If you like tiffy's poppies, you might look at seedman.com as I saw some that looked fringed like that. Just put in a small order but got two kinds of red and a couple other things. Their website is a little tricky to navigate and order from, and since I had a keystroke logger scare (think I'm clean but not 100% sure), I didn't want to give out my cc info online any more places right now. BTW watch for a popup that looks like Windows (and yes, I'm using Firefox) and tells you you have several trojans and viruses. DO NOT click on fix it. ONLY click on the x to close it and sometimes they can even fool you with that. After that scare, I made sure my definitions were up-to-date and ran another scan and the auto one since. Came up clean, but you can never be sure. So seedman has a way you can place your order then change a dropdown menu to call (they will send you their 800# by email). It wasn't very user friendly, he says they're going to another system, but if you poke around there enough you will find a whole list of plants and lots of exotic ones. I couldn't find what I wanted anywhere else, even onestoppoppies.com. To tell the difference of an annual vs. perennial. I don't know. But Bluestone has the livermore, and they sell only perennials (got some of those seeds from seedman). I think all the Shirleys are annuals as well as the little corn poppies, purple grape poppy. But I'd have to look up the Orientals. The blue Himalayan is perennial but too tricky to try to grow right now. I've been looking for a nice purple bachelor's button like I saw growing in my friend's garden with blue. seedman has a pretty one of those, so I plan to try it, looked all over the web for purple bb.

I'm wanting to sow somniferum poppy seeds soon, so here are my thoughts. If your soil is prepared, now. Nature's way is to sow them as the seeds fall to the ground, June or July. Last year I had poppies that seeded themselves, appeared by fall, and were so much nicer and healthier than my winter-sown attempts, or the ones I direct- sowed in December. [I've been waiting on neighbors (one said she sowed hers, both poppies and larkspurs, last June) to give me larkspur seeds since July, but I still have no larkspur seeds. ] The problem is that I mulch and also sow annuals, such as huge zinnias where I want those spring bloomers, and then want to amend the soil when they are done blooming. But if I sow them after November they come up late, and if we have an early heat wave, they don't last very long. Have you tried enclosing seeds in clay balls? If you have any clay soil at all, mix it with some compost and seeds and moisten it, roll it into little balls and place them in your garden. Thin out when they sprout. The clay prevents them from blowing away or getting eaten all at once. And you don't have to transplant, just thin. (Plants hate to be transplanted!) Another idea: place chicken wire or something else over them to deter critters when you sow them. I look forward to other responses to your question, and the problems (and blessings) of our multi-planting seasons here in the Carolinas. Andrea

Lisa, I am not laughing, but I am grinning..... Somehow, I think your 'Shoal Creek' will be the exact same as the chaste tree you had growing the last time I was at your house. The description of the need to cut it back to maintain the smaller size just reeks of, um....business as usual with any chaste tree. It drives me crazy when they try to present a "new" or "different" variety of a widely-grown plant and we cannot find any way in which it actually is new or different. Maybe, though, when you grow it and can compare it to the chaste tree you already have, you'll see some sort of difference. Let me know what you think of it after you've watched it grow this season. okiegardener, Honestly, I think you could broadcast sow larkspur seed on concrete and it would sprout and grow. This is one of my favorite kinds of flowers----they won't die, you cannot kill them and they readily reseed and come back every year. Well, Lisa may have destroyed hers, but only because she dug up or disturbed the seedlings in the fall. : ) Larkspur will germinate and grow pretty quickly when the soil temperature is in the 50-60 degree range. From new seed, it blooms maybe 50 or 60 days after it sprouts. I think fall sowing is better because you'll get flowers earlier in spring, but if you were to broadcast seed now in the area where you want the plants to grow, then the seeds would germinate in 2 to 4 weeks. So, you'd likely have blooms by the end of May. As long as you keep them well-watered (but not too wet in clay) and deadheaded, they'll bloom well until it gets too hot for them. At my house that is sometime in June or July. The only trouble I've ever had with larkspur in unimproved clay is when we have had tremendously heavy rainfall (12" or more in one day to one month) and in those cases, the poor little plants rotted right off at the soil line. Based on long-range forecasts, this doesn't seem like a year in which you'd have to worry about too much rain rotting the plants, even in the densest clay. I've lived here 15 years and have grown larkspur 15 years. It generally reseeds all over the place, and some years I have to yank out and throw away a lot of seedlings. Since you have the seeds, I'd say go for it and plant them. It would be better to direct sow, but you could plant them and transplant them. However, you'd need to transplant them while very small to avoid disturbing their roots. They can sulk if transplanted once they're big or once the weather is hot. Is there any reason that you cannot go ahead and direct sow them? To make transplanting easier, you could sow the seeds in soil-less mix in paper cups. Poke holes in the bottom for drainage. They need to be cool to sprout, so I'd put them on the porch or something unless you keep your house at 50-60 degrees max. At planting time, just plant them paper cup and all in the ground. The cup decomposes pretty quickly. How long they'll flower this year is iffy and we have no way of knowing because we don't know how long they'll take to sprout or exactly when the temperatures will get hot enough to shut them down. Some of the larkspurs (and poppies) in my garden have formed buds already and likely will begin blooming next week if today's "possible" thunderstorms don't dump hail on them that smashes them to smithereens. So, yours will be a little bit behind, but not impossibly so. I usually have poppies and larkspur emerging from the ground from self-sown seed for a long period of time, roughly from February through April and sometimes even in May. If you want to speed up the germination, soak the seed in a cup of water for 12-12 hours before you sow it. Dawn