Well, yes, I guess you could say I grow "saffron". I grow them soley for flowers though & I'm unhappy with their performance. I don't know if it's my coastal climate & lack of sunshine, or what. They bulbs throw leaves in the early spring...then, the leaves grow very long (like 14-16" long). Come mid-July, the now ratty looking foliage finally dies back & disappears. Come late October (here), the flowers emerge from the ground sans leaves. The stems are quite long (8", or so). Those flowers are the best barometer I've ever seen! The minute they emerge from the ground...it pours rain & the flowers are plummeted to the ground never to stand upright again. I've tried planting the rascals in the middle of pachysandra for support...didn't help. The flowers just laid over on the ground cover. So, from a gardener's perspective...they are worthless little buggers. I've never gone out there & fished them out of the mud to pluck the stigmas.

To answer your quantity question...it would take hundreds to get .25 ounce.

/tricia

5-7 pounds per acre, according to Penzeys.

There are 450-500 stigmas (the female part of the flower) in one gram of saffron. Each flower produces 3 stigmas, also called threads or strands, so you'd need at least 150 flowers to make one gram of saffron.

triciae - you have what they call fall blooming crocus - there's a specific name for them that I can't think of right at the moment of course!! I want to say colchicums or something like that, but I could be wrong. They're very expensive plants tho!! Anyway, it's a specific spring flowering crocus that saffron comes from.

I lucked out in having an Iranian brother-in-law! He brings back saffron from Iran all the time. I probably have about $300-$400 worth of saffron sitting in my spice cabinet!

Lisa

We used to grow them here by the pond, and they bloomed in early spring. The flowers were lovely, but I never harvested the saffron from them - I think you need tweezers to do it, and they had very short stems, meaning that you have to get close to the ground to harvest them. We also grew opium poppies for the flowers and of course never harvested the opium, but I did use the seeds in cooking - they make tons of seeds.

Lars

Saffron crocus is Crocus sativus and blooms in October.

Colchicum autumnale (which is also called meadow saffron) closely resembles the saffron crocus and also blooms in October, but Colchicum is poisonous.

So if you want to try growing it, do make sure you're getting the right plant!

Yep, I've got saffron crocus &, like I said, they bloom in October. I wanted them for next to my Montauk daisies but, alas, they will not stand up.

The spring crocus, Lisa, do not produce saffron although I wish they did because I'm successful with those!

/t

Thanks, folks. I guess I'd have to get a bigger yard, eh?