Grow Your Own Saffron?

Beautiful, expensive saffron

A little hard work never hurt anyone, right? Kudos to those who grow and harvest saffron as it’s extremely time-consuming and, therefore, quite expensive.

Saffron, the dried orange-red flower stigmas of the fall-blooming Crocus sativus, must be harvested by hand because machinery would damage the leaves, which are needed to produce food for the plant. So, it’s stoop way down (crocus flowers are only a couple of inches above the soil) and carefully pick the flower, take a step, then stoop, and pick again.

It takes about 4,000 crocuses to yield the 12,000 or so stigmas needed for a single ounce of saffron. And every single crocus bulb has to be planted (by hand, bent over) every second or third spring to divide the daughter corms; and then each of the daughter corms has to be planted (by hand, bent over). Close your eyes and imagine doing that for a single row, let alone a few acres, and you might not begrudge those farmers the profits.

But if your back is strong and your desires can be satisfied with just a few dishes flavored with home-grown saffron (it takes the stigmas from 15 to 20 crocuses to make a single pinch), all that’s needed is a perfectly drained, full-sun site that bakes dry during the summer so the bulbs can lie dormant until fall. Plant saffron crocuses in early September and the flowers will be ready for harvest in October or November. Air-dry the stigmas after separating them from the flowers (by hand, bent over the kitchen table).

by Vicki Schilleman, OCMGA blog editor

Trying to extend the growing season?

It’s absolutely soul-crushing ripping big healthy pepper plants from the ground as the weather gets cold. Especially since they’re still covered with flowers. It makes you want to haul them inside and continue to harvest your vegetables. A couple of things to keep in mind, though:

Your peppers should be able to pollinate themselves, though you might compensate for absent breezes by shaking the plants gently every other day. But the conditions are so poor, that helping with pollination probably won’t help. While a healthy pepper plant will keep right on making flowers for quite a while after it has been brought indoors, it’s making them with energy stored up from its season in the sun. That’s enough for flowers, but not for fruit, and the energy is bound to run out as the plant adjusts to indoor conditions. Peppers are perennials that can indeed flower and fruit all year if conditions are right, but that’s a big “if” unless you have a heated greenhouse.

Small-fruited peppers like habaneros do better indoors than the large-fruited bell types. Naturally small plants do even better. Regardless of size, however, all of them grow and fruit best when they get lots and lots of sun, and day temperatures between 68º and 78ºF. Nights can be a bit cooler, as they as they don’t go below 60º. It sounds easy, but in most homes there’s a built-in problem: peppers tend to drop their flowers if stressed by wide swings in temperature, and such wide swings are common near the sunny south windows that are most likely to provide enough light.

Indoor life presents other stresses that can cause flower drop. Peppers prefer consistent moisture, but potted plants often alternate between the desert of neglect and the overwatered swamp of remorse. Aphids are likely to be a problem as well — peppers are among their favorite plants.

What all this means is that most Northern gardeners are content to see their peppers simply live through the winter. Having a mature plant ready to put outside in early summer will give you a much longer season than if you had started from scratch, and it is reason enough to keep your habaneros growing, even without winter fruits.

Personal note: I did try this with cherry tomatoes a couple of winters ago. Worked well for a short time, but the indoor growing conditions eventually wore out both my plant and my enthusiasm.

Go Native!

Sunflowers

Although popular culture has embraced the myth that sunflowers always follow the sun, this is inaccurate. Only young flowers “move” to face it throughout the day. Once they reach maturity, they stop sun-tracking—their blooms forever turned eastward.

Recent studies suggest that sunflowers share a common mechanism with human beings, circadian rhythms organized around a 24-hour day. Scientists hypothesize these circadian rhythms—behavioral changes associated with an internal clock—explain sun tracking in young blossoms.

Young blooms face east at dawn to meet the rising sun. Then, throughout the day, they slowly modulate west as the sun moves across the sky. Once it sets in the west, the plants spend the night slowly turning eastward to start the cycle again.

As sunflowers mature, this process comes to a halt. Overall growth slows, and the flower’s circadian clock reacts most intensely to the sun’s early morning rays than those later in the day. As a result, the blooms gradually stop tracking westward altogether.

Source: Ripley’s Believe It or Not!