This summer I was looking at a flower bouquet and realized, holy crap there's golf ball sized poppy pods in that thing. I shook one and it was full of seed. It was too tempting to try planting some, so I broght them home. These seeds are tiny, and the germination rate is really poor (at least from the florist...). They also took a few weeks to germinate. In fact I gave up on them and planted other stuff in there a few days before the first of them sprouted. There was a near 100% attrition rate on the survivors, but I did salvage one. It has been almost eaten by snails, drowned in the rain and narrowly missed a major frost, but now it's sitting on a windowsill and is the biggest it's ever been, but that's not saying much. Presumably it'll take off like a rocket once it goes outside in the spring, and probably flower.
As I understand it you need to grow a crapload of poppies to get an appreciable harvest out of the things, and it's not really worthwhile to grow them under artificial lighting because you can legally buy poppy pods online relatively cheaply (look for 'poppy pod' on ebay: if the seller uses a lighter for scale, what do you think it's for?
). Appearantly they're legal to have for floral, art and food (the seed) purposes as long as you don't cut them to milk the sap or do anything else to purify it.
I'd only use a poppy medicinally if I hit my thumb with a hammer or something with similar lasting pain, but not worth going to the hospital where they have better things. Or the world goes to heck and you have to grow your own medicines.
