We're just mad about Crocus sativus

This innocuous little autumn-flowering crocus produces saffron, the world’s most expensive spice.

Saffron is what you get when you detach the stigmas and dry them. (Stigmas are the sticky ends of a flower’s reproductive girly parts.) Harvesting takes place over a six week period in mid-late autumn. The flowers are picked early in the morning so they don’t get a chance to open and the stigmas stay protected.

Then, assuming your extremities haven’t turned black and gangrenous from that 15-degree frost you’ve just been working in for the last hour or so, you take the flowers inside, extract the tiny stigmas (keeping them attached to each other, naturally), dry them to the correct standard, weigh them and proudly admire your morning’s work: half a gram of finished product.

That’s why saffron’s so expensive.

Farmer Wan and I, being suckers for this sort of punishment, decided it was about time we took a crash course on a cash crop and so we recently acquired 1,000 C.sativus corms. We wanted to give them the best possible chance of producing highest-grade saffron, so we went to a fair bit of trouble to ensure they’d flourish.

After calculating that we’d need 20m2 of growing space, Farmer Wan knocked up eight raised beds from untreated eucalyptus. You can follow what we did next by viewing the slideshow below.

Posted by Farmer Nik