13/10/11 ..One of Britain’s only saffron growers has begun her annual vigil of watching her flowers turn to precious crocus flowers need to
13/10/11 ..One of Britain’s only saffron growers has begun her annual vigil of watching her flowers turn to precious crocus flowers need to be watched all the time so they can be picked the moment the flowers begin to emerge from the soil. .The cultivated saffron crocus, flowers over a two-week period in October. “They normally come up in the morning but today there were only a few first thing – I checked on them again at lunch time and there were lots of flowers. I think this year’s weather has confused them a bit and made the flowering a lot harder to predict this season,” explained Caroline Riden who has been growing saffron at her home near Wrexham in North Wales for 25 “The crocus family begins flowering in the autumn with their grand finale in the “They flower in pulses, some days you’ll get lots and other days very few. It’s important to pick them early to get the best quality saffron,” she to be ‘worth its weight in gold’, saffron comes from the bright red stigmas from a cultivated variety of the Autumn crocus, Crocus sativus [italics]. Each flower has three stigmas that are painstakingly picked by hand. It takes 200,000 of them to make just one kilo of saffron. Unsurprisingly, only around 300 tons of the spice is produced globally each said: “One year I picked about 70,000 flowers. This year’s flowers are from corms in their third year in the ground so we’re expecting a bountiful crop. Although it would have been even better if we’d had a good summer – flowers need the right temperature to “I’ve always been interested in spices and in the 70s you couldn’t buy it anywhere. When I saw how beautiful the flowers are, I decided to grow them “I now give talks on saffron and sell a booklet with six tips on things you need to juggle to grow saffron successfully in Britain. It’s £30 and includes 20 mature corms to get people started.”.Caroline also sel
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