Saffron

We were worried about the possible critters feasting on the young corms and we wanted to control soil pH levels at first so we opted for some simple plastic baskets for growing.

We quickly drilled some small holes for proper drainage.

We started with plain old sandy Florida soil, but we went straight organic for soil amendment using a combination of potting soil and manure in different ratios to test pH levels.

We experimenting with different planting depths along with several pH ranges to see if would have any effect on how well the crop came up.

In the end, almost everything we planted came up in the plastic containers which we had also partially buried into the ground.

Even the saffron we planted straight into the soil came up, albeit a little more straggly than the crowded bins. We learned a bunch.

For planting season 2 we decided upon rows only and set about making mounds for the saffron and trenches between the rows for drainage.

Once we knew our planting depth and that we wanted 10 rows, it was time to see how long those rows would need to be based upon packing in 100 corms per row.

We wondered what it would be like to plant the corms into their  own individual holes and quickly found out that as cool as it looked, it was not scalable. We lasted about a half row of experimentation and quickly moved back to packing them into rows and covering them with soil in stretches at a time.

And then the saffron started to come up, including a few that actually had blossoms and one that had actual saffron in it! This cause much hugging, laughter, tears of joy and celebration that lasted for nearly three minutes.

In the end, we planted a 1,000 corms across ten rows with some rows featuring a screen underlining to inhibit moles, voles or other underground dwellers from snacking on our saffron experimentation.

Turns out plastic bins don’t do so well in the Florida climate. By the time we got to season 3, our original plastic containers from season 1 were no longer viable.

So what did we do?
We dug up every single saffron bulb we could find from season 1.

After digging up and sorting through the original saffron corms we planted, we discovered they had begun to multiple. What started as 100 corms grew into over 450 corms. Once spread out for sorting and counting, they sort of looked like Hershey’s Kisses.

We knew we were going to need to prep a much larger surface area to put down over 6,000 saffron corms and that’s we borrowed this super cool tiller from all around excellent peeps Griff and Becca Winthrop.

The tiller was great for turning over the soil, but it still won’t dig  you a trench. We opted for the manual route here with shovel and determination.

As in season 2, we continued to experiment with underlining, this time opting for landscaping lining of which we had plenty on hand. We rolled enough to test a single row this time.

So the worst part of laying underlining before you plant is you have to cover it all up first and then you still have to do your planting, hence the reason we only experimented with one row.

So what do 5,000 bulbs of saffron look like?
The answer: a lot of work!

So after all the digging up of old bulbs, all the tilling, underlining and prep work, we finally got to plant the season 3 crop of saffron.

After our biggest planting season yet, it was nice to see some early results, although the true results won’t come until season 4 since it generally takes a year for a newly planted crop to produce.