I Bought A Blue Poppy Plant At A Local Nursery In Early Spring. After Getting The Poppy Home I Became Aware Of How Difficult It Was To Grow. I Found All The Information That I Could Over The Internet, Some Of The Environmental Needs Were Too Imposible For Me So I Did The Best I Could By Making It A Home In The South West Corner Of My Floer Bed. First I Removed A 20 Year Old Juniper,then I Mulched The Area As Deep As I Could With Alot Of Peat Moss, I Read Somewhere Not To Apply Fertalizer In The First Year So I Didn't Feed It Anything Although I Was Very Tempted. When I Put It In The Ground The Nights Were Still Very Chilly (even Light Frost) So I At Night I Would Often Cover It With A 2 Liter Milk Jug, Bottom Cut Out, Cap Removed. A Couple Of Times We Even Got Snow So I Left The Cover On Until The Snow Melted. It Looked So Lonely And Took Up So Much Of My Valuable Planting Space (i Thought It Was Going To Die Anyways) That I Started To Put Plants Around It Such As Canna Lily, Cala Lilys, Impatients, Ferns And Hostas. I Treated The Same All Summer As The Plants That Were Around It (no Special Attention). To My Surprise The Plant Has Flourished And It Is Going To Blossom With Three Flowers.
Cool, humid, quiet (wind sheltered) environment for Meconopsis. Humus rich, fertile soil, quite moist in summer but not wet in winter. Like other cloudland plants, apt to become infested with mites during hot, dry weather. Most species are monocarpic (growing for variable numbers of years, flowering and then dying), but popular blue species M. betonicifolia can be made to form side shoots and live on as a perennial if prevented from going to seed its first year. If your plant is a seedling of this species, as they usually are, you should pinch off the flowers as soon as they are spent, so that seedpods do not form.
