Fear not floral designers, timing poppies to open for your event is easy. In this video, Kelly demonstrates a simple method for opening poppies, and shares a few other related tips like when to cut poppies, how to judge the longevity and vase life of poppies, and a few of her favorite varieties for cutting.

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Transcript:

All right, in this video, I am going to help you take your poppies from here to here. It's a really common thing to be in a situation where, ooh, all my poppies look like this and my event is coming up very soon. I need them to be open and beautiful and ready to go. So I'm going to just teach you a simple little technique that I like to call poppy peeling. So poppies, whenever they are cut, wholesale or from the garden, you're going to want to have the kind that have just a little bit of a crack where you can see some color coming through. That lets you know that the petals inside your poppy have, you know, developed. If this crack hadn't happened yet, you can still peel the poppies. You might just have a petal that hasn't quite grown the whole way or you might have a poppy that's a bit misshapen or just not ready to, not ready to hatch yet. So you want to look for that little bit of a crack. Then down here at the base of the poppy, right where you have one of these cracks, just very gently with your fingernail, you're going to start peeling away at this base. Now what's tricky about this and what you have to be careful about is that if you're too, well, if you're too gentle, you won't get the pod off, and if you're too forceful about it, you could damage this delicate petal that lays right underneath the pod. So this takes just a little bit of practice. You might lose a few flowers in the process as you're practicing getting the hang of the amount of pressure to apply, things like that. So we are just, we're just pulling this pod off very gently until we have the whole pod off and the flower is set free. It's amazing to me how the petals are so delicate and this pod is so tough, yet somehow those delicate petals push that pod off of there when they're ready to come out. So is it a time-consuming process? Yes, it is. But it's definitely worth it. So now your, it's kind of like a butterfly that needs to dry off its wings. So it needs to just sit a little bit in this kind of a state before it will pop open. So these poppies I peeled two days ago, and this is what you're looking at, how they've gone from here to there. If you want to give 'em a little bit of a head start, you can gently put a little air so you can see that center that's exposed and that will help. So for an event, you're of course going to want them at their optimal peak openness. If you're doing something retail, you might want to just pop them shortly before you're going to put them in the piece. Maybe you have one open poppy like this that is a focal point, so whenever your client picks up, you can say, "This one here is going to open, "and this is going to give you a longer vase life." So that's something that you can explain to your retail clients if you decide you'd like to use poppies. These are Icelandic. They do very well as cuts. I know some people are little bit shy of poppies because of shattering and their vase life but these are pretty tough. They are a single-petaled flower though, so those flowers do tend to have a shorter vase life but they're so fun and people love them. You can see how this one was in a place where it was a little bit more ready to pop open. It came out very easily. When the pod starts feeling dry, you know that it's just, just about to let go. So this one does. It feels quite dry compared to the other. Feeling flowers and getting a sense, you know, not being afraid to touch them I feel like is very important for a floral professional and any kind of person who's interested in flowers because it tells you a lot about the flower and where they are in the course of their life, those types of things. So one last little, let's finish peeling this one so you can tell, you can see how thin this is. This means it's just about ready to pop on its own and how it comes and it has a little bit of spring to it. So by really getting a sense of the different, like this one was tough and this one is nice and thin, so that tells you a little bit about where the flower is. So this one that popped right open, this is going to open a little bit faster than this one that we had to give a little bit of force to. So that is it. And that is how you pop poppies. Wishing you the best on your next event where you are using them. There are so many great varieties of cut poppies out there. I love the peony poppies, the mother-of-pearls, they're so great for blush palettes, and then of course here we have the Icelandics, nice, bright, and super cheerful. Wishing you a wonderful day. Thanks so much for tuning in.