Last year I covered all the seed pods from my beautiful lavender colored poppies. They were very prolific and quite a job to cover all the pods with nylons or coffee filters before they dried up and burst, spreading more plants in the spring of this year. This spring I bought 6 or 7 new varieties of poppies (one of my favorite flowers} and am delighted to have an enormous collection of beautiful poppies in my gardens. My problem now is I want to collect the seeds from them all like last year but don't think I could ever cover them all like I did last year. 1: Do the pods need to dry on the stock before the seeds will be viable next year? 2: Can I just cut the stocks and bring all the pods in that way and save the seeds? 3 Does anyone have any easier way to capture all the seeds? I share the seeds with my family and friends so need to collect the seeds and besides there are so many in the flower gardens this year because of my overdoing my purchasing them that if all those seeds from the pods spew out there won't be room for anything else or for them all actually. Help, Many are starting to turn a light tan so won't be long before they are ready to burst.

I usually just let the plants remain in garden and when pods dried on plant cut the stem with dried head. Gather a bunch of these and shake em over spread newspapers, This way they're easy to pour the seeds into a container for storage and later dissemination. The poppies I grow are the annual (opium) ones.
After getting them all together I wait till there's some snow on the ground and broadcast them over the snow where I want them to grow. As they emerge, usually some thinning out is necessary to get big plants that season.