The Cutting Edge Podcast Episode #56: Saffron Production and Marketing

00:00:55 Speaker: welcome to the Cutting Edge podcast, episode number fifty six. Today we’re going to talk about saffron. 00:01:00 Speaker: My name is Jerry Clark. I’m a regional educator with Chippewa Dunn in Eau Claire counties. 00:01:04 Speaker: And joining me as a co-host today is Anne from Racine, Kenosha counties. Ann welcome today. Thank you Jerry. I’m excited to be here. Like you said. Yep. I’m in Racine and Kenosha Counties the southeast part of the state. seems like the last time we had saffron as a subject for the cutting edge was five or six years ago, before my time here. But you were one of the interviewers, Right? Yeah. We started this with, with our guests, Margaret and Richard from the University of Vermont. And we just want to continue that conversation, get some updates on where the saffron industry market’s at, maybe some basic, type of information as we go along. And also joining us today is Christian Schmieder. Christian, you want to introduce yourself just real briefly, and then we’ll get to our guests. Yeah. Hi. Thanks for bringing me on the podcast. I’m a home gardener. I live in Madison, Wisconsin, and I started growing saffron last year, and I’m hoping to, do a little better every year. So I’m excited to hear what I can, glean from you all. Yeah. Thanks for joining us, Christian. It’s great to have a, homeowner that can maybe grow into a commercial grower. And I think that’s how we all start is baby steps on some of these emerging crops as we go along with extension resources and research and information. So I’m glad you could join us today. So yes, again, joining us today is Margaret Skinner and, Richard Bamford, from the University of Vermont. Margaret, you just want to introduce yourself quick. Sure. I’m a research professor and entomologist, as well as an extension entomologist. And, the way we survive is with, a lot of diversification, with the kind of research that we do. So even though I’m an entomologist at heart, I do other work. The basic goal is to meet the needs of growers. thank you. Margaret. Richard, do you want to introduce yourself quick? Hi. My name is Richard Bamford. I have been at the entomology research lab now for four years, and, as a research scientist, I have learned quite a bit about saffron. We have spent many, many hours on saffron, and it is quite the plant. Thank you. Awesome. this crop is new to me. And so I have brushed up a little bit. We have talked about saffron here on the cutting edge a few episodes a number of years ago, like I said. But if one of you could speak a little bit about I know it’s got an unusual life cycle, and the production of it is a little interesting. If one of you could give us a brief overview, that would be great. Yeah. I think, Margaret, you punted that one to me. Right. So, um, yeah, I think the easiest place to start is actually planting corms for the, the first time. And typically, at least in this region. and I think uh, you’ll, you’ll plant the corms, for saffron in August to early September. And if you could get the corms earlier than that, maybe go in a little earlier, but ours come from Holland and there’s kind of limits as to how quickly they can get here after they’ve been harvested. So anyhow, once they’re in the ground, several weeks later, on average about four to eight, you’re going to start seeing some, shoots and some buds, making their way through the ground. And then from there. Um, the, the flowering really will, take off and there’s about a two week period where you get peak production of saffron here. It’s usually, mid October into November. And some of it depends on the planting. Different plantings from different years will bloom earlier or later than other ones. So it’s, nothing, it’s not absolute. anyhow, so when the peak flowering is wrapping up, then you really notice that the foliage takes off. And interestingly, saffron will grow all winter long. It’ll, its foliage will at least. And, you’re going to see these distinct tufts or crowns, coming from the ground. And they can be quite large. I mean, they don’t get huge here in Vermont, but they can get well over, I don’t know, two feet long. Three feet long. It’s not unprecedented. we don’t see those numbers here, but you do in other places. so anyhow, the foliage again will keep growing into early spring. And what’s important here with this new foliage growth, you are beginning to get the, formation of, cormlets or daughter corms. And, these are originating from the mother. We’ll call it the corm that was planted last year, but affectionately we call it the mother corm. And, so this is critical to the reproduction cycle. So anyhow, as, spring moves to summer, the foliage will then start browning up. But underground. These daughter corms are really, maturing and they, become fully formed. And then the mother corm itself basically, dries up. it’s given up its, nutrients to form these daughter corms. And, when ultimately you, dig dormant corms up, you’ll see what appears to be like a brown cap. And that represents the, dried up mother corm. It’s kind of like a, little button at the bottom of the of the new corms. So anyhow, then with the foliage, back to the summertime, when the foliage is completely dried up, that’s when the saffron enters its dormant stage and that’s usually June through September. And, it can vary regionally vary. and then those daughter corms have now become next year’s, mother corms, and they will start the whole process over again. So it’s, worth noting, even though we have talked to growers and gone through this cycle a million times, we still get calls or emails saying, okay, now the corms are dormant. Should we dig them up? Or they might say, okay, they finished flowering. The leaves are still green. Should we dig them up and put them in our garage? No. It is really important that you keep the corms in the ground as long as the leaves are green, because they are continuing to produce a larger corm in the ground for the next year’s. Crop. So people always forget that they, think it’s like other spring bulbs and it’s not like that at all. So we usually recommend that people leave their corms in the ground for at least four years. There’s no need to dig them up every year because you sort of reduce the production cycle by disrupting them. Yeah, that’s, a great point because, again, going back five years or so when we started this, first podcast, Margaret, you sent me some corms and we put them in, in my home garden again. It was just okay. And the way we started, this was okay. Vermont was doing this. They’re on the forty fifth parallel for the most part. So was northern Wisconsin. So that was kind of the the theory behind we should be able to grow them here if Vermont can. And, I remember calling you the first spring. So I planted them that fall. That first spring, they were green in March. And I said, it’s going to freeze twenty times between now and, May or the first of June, we’re going to get all these frosts. And you said, nope. That’s what it’s supposed to do. And that put me at ease because I’m like This is never going to work because it’s going to freeze way too many times already. So, yeah, I think that physiology part of it is, key to this whole thing. I, will call this person a friend. I, could not convince him that it was a fall flower. He was trying to make it a spring crocus And then he was telling me, look, it survived the winter. I’m like, yes, we know. and this is in Maryland which is at the fortieth parallel or something like that. At what point would you divide them to pull these daughter corms off? That is a good question. That for which we really don’t have a definitive answer in some parts of the country that have a longer growing season than Wisconsin or Vermont, though their corms tend to get bigger than ours. And because they have a longer period of time when they’re photosynthesizing, so they get larger. So that mother corm produces more and larger. we’ll call them baby corms. Um, so my feeling in Vermont. Well, if your corms get really big, they start crowding each other out. That doesn’t really seem to be happening in Vermont that much because our corms don’t get so big. Now, in Pennsylvania, Holy smokes, they get big. we’re doing a, a genetic study to look at differences in, the genetic makeup of corms from Pennsylvania that have been growing there theoretically for over three hundred years to see if that’s different than the Dutch corms that we get here. And already we’re seeing huge differences in just the form of what the forms look like, whether that is a genetic thing or not, we don’t know. But it blew my mind when I saw how big the corms were in Pennsylvania. And I know they get cold. It gets cold there. They got snow and stuff, but they do have a longer, warmer period in December, and their spring starts a whole lot earlier than, Vermont and Wisconsin. And so in Pennsylvania, after four to five years, you probably need to dig them up because they are crowding each other out. I’m not sure that’s it probably could be six or more years in some of our colder regions, but we always recommend to growers that they sample their corms, once the corms go dormant in June or whenever, to do a little bit of sampling, dig up the corms because they’re dormant so you can dig them up and count them, look at what their size is and then plant them back down in the ground again. and we have a fact sheet, that we can send people describing how to do that sampling. It gives you a better idea of what’s going on under the ground there. So from a, from a market standpoint, Margaret, how is the, I know the US is a very small player in this, in this market, but how is prices or production going in Vermont in terms of, commercial growers? So it’s worth noting that I just looked up the other day and, the US in twenty twenty four, I think it was, they imported over fifty four tons of saffron. That’s two one hundred and nine thousand pounds. I can’t even imagine how much that must be. though that’s coming from Spain, Afghanistan, India, probably maybe China and, probably from Iran. Circuitously. so there’s a lot of saffron coming into the US. but the quality and the purity of that product is often in question because saffron is the most adulterated, spice in the world for good reason, because it is the most expensive spice. and so it’s very common for importers to put in a little bit of saffron and put a bunch of safflower flowers, or they sometimes use corn silk that they’ve died. There are sometimes little, shaped wood shavings that they very carefully make to look like, saffron. So you don’t always know, the purity of the product. And that’s why when we, the growers in the United States, well, customers might say, well, why should we buy saffron grown in the US when we can get it from Iran? From if you go online, you can get it for probably five dollars a gram. People in that are selling product that they have grown in the US. The prices range from twenty dollars a gram to seventy five dollars a gram, and they are selling out. I’d have to say, I’m not sure the seventy five dollars rate is sustainable in the long run. but that’s what the range of, prices are. I think the real value of saffron as a product will be in value added products, where you don’t need to use too much saffron because it is pretty labor intensive for a short period of time to, pick the flowers and separate them and dry them and stuff. and so there are other products that have a better bang for the buck. So I’ll just give you a couple of examples. We’ve been, experimenting with saffron infused honey. And one of the reasons for that is saffron is, It’s an acquired taste. And in Iran, uh, they use saffron in every meal, every day. In the US, people might say, oh, I’ll, make some paella as a special event or something like that. So it’s not in our palette, on a regular basis. And some people don’t always like the flavor. it’s an interesting flavor. And so, merging it with honey, makes it much more interesting to the American palate, I should say. there’s a grower up in Canada. And you all know that the flowers are purple and beautiful color purple. What he does is he dries the petals separately from the stigmas, which is the actual saffron. He dries those purple petals. He grinds them into a powder and he sells them, sells that powder to high end restaurants As you know, these days, the really fancy restaurants plating is everything. So I can just imagine, uh, dark chocolate, uh, flourless cake with purple powder around the top. Oh, God. Beautiful. Anyway, so there are a lot of these kinds of things. Some people are making teas where they include saffron as part of a, total package. So I think those are the kinds of things in the future that have great potential. The other thing is marketing. I think the one thing that hasn’t been developed enough, at least in this country, is the medicinal components of saffron. And some of them, you know, with a lot of things like this, there is tendency to be exaggerated or over the top. But saffron really has some interesting properties. it has been used for everything from depression to treating cancer. So, I think if it’s marketed with that in mind, we could probably develop interest in this country, noting all the other supplemental things that are out there. so Christian, you were asking what other parts of the plant are edible? Technically, the entire flower is edible, I believe. it’s not usually the only thing that’s used is the stigma, which is the three orange threads. But a grower over in Lebanon, the country. He had so many flowers and not enough of a market, nor enough labor to do all the processing. He had so many flowers He blended them in a blender. The whole flower. He washed them and everything first blended them in the blender and made saffron jam, which included both the stigmas and the stamens and the petals. And it was this beautiful color. and he said that was a very popular thing. So there’s lots of things that people could be playing around with. but there is a real need to develop the market more. And, some of that is to make sure that people, the customer understands that when you’re buying saffron from a known grower, you know, you’re getting the real thing. You know, you’re getting good quality. And that’s the whole point of the locavore movement really, that you’re getting a product that you believe in. Do we have any USDA standards for saffron? good question. one of the, US, food safety, regulations that came out a few years ago, that has been a little bit challenging for small growers because saffron is considered a food crop and because you separate the stigmas from the rest of the flower and then you dry it, potentially has different regulations and it really varies from state to state. Now in Vermont, because saffron is not that big in industry, small time growers can sell it in their farmers markets or wherever, and that works very well. New York state, however, is very stringent. And so if farmers want to sell their saffron, they must dry it in an area that is specific to the processing of that crop. And they have to get someone from the state to come in and inspect it, etc.. You can’t do it in your kitchen, in other words. And so that has made it a little bit more complicated. And sometimes people from other states say, well, what can we do here in this state? I don’t know what all the states are, what each state regulation is. So it’s worth growers who are interested in getting serious about it to look into their contact, their state agency of AG, to find out what the regulations are. I also tell growers they need to treat it like a food crop and, use all the, you know, wash your hands and make sure the area is clean and stuff like that so that you have a high quality product that you’re selling. So I just had a kind of a follow up to the processing, which is basically drying. So Christian, I know you’re very small grower. are you using more of a dehydrator and oven? I know Margaret and one of our podcasts, you said one captures the, flavor, quicker you can dry it, the more quality. Christian. I don’t know if you’ve had any experience playing with that yet Yeah, for me, actually, the, getting the saffron corms was for me, the, impetus to finally pull the trigger on a dehydrator. I always wanted one. Now that I’m hearing from Margaret that you can also dehydrate the pedals, it’s going to be even better. So I have dehydrator that I use. I do like one hundred and sixty degrees. I think that’s like twenty, thirty minutes. So like in the medium, I read from the resources that, Margaret put together that, the hotter temperature, shorter time creates more intense flavor, but my dehydrator only goes to one hundred sixty five. So that’s what I’m doing because my oven is harder to regulate. And, the only thing that I found is because I have such small amounts that I get every day. I put it on a little piece of, paper and then put a canning jar ring around them so that the ventilator doesn’t blow away the corm, the little, stamens. but that’s working okay. I mean, I’m just drying like fifteen, twenty five little things a day, but it’s super fun and it works. And after that I freeze them. just to be sure. So the thing about that, I think if you’re only going to use the saffron directly from the freezer, that might work. But you might get some moisture build up if, you put it in the freezer and then you took it out of the freezer, I’m not sure it will stay dry. one of the, one of the tricky things is how dry is dry. And, I’d have to say, you know, you can say, okay, dry it at this temperature for this many minutes. Um, but sometimes the stigmas have more, moisture in them. So it takes longer. So you sort of develop an appreciation for. this is dry enough, but I don’t want it to be brittle. So it is, a little bit of a, skill. And if it’s, if it’s rubbery, that is, it won’t break. Then you run the risk that it has too much moisture and it will grow mold. It’s not necessarily in the freezer. but definitely if you, have it out and I think the ISO standard is, twelve percent, water weight after drying something like that. So, we have developed a relationship with a food chemist in New York state, and he has tested some of our saffron for the key components that people look for. And we gave him some saffron that we had harvested. I think in twenty three, twenty four and twenty five. And what we do is after we dry it, we put it in a glass container in the dark. It’s important that it stays in the dark. We do not freeze it. And he tested those three years and the quality of the saffron was still good The twenty twenty three and the twenty twenty five. All of them were of equal quality. It is important to keep it, in the dark. And I think putting it in either glass or metal is important rather than in plastic. So, in your research, Margaret and Richard, has there been a year where there’s been a good year, bad year in terms of production or quality? Has weather driven any of that in terms of too wet too dry? you know, cold winter, open winter, no snow cover any, correlation to how the plants are surviving or the production that following year? Well, I mean, it’s interesting because we have a relatively large study going on now with three different plantings So they’re identical. it was originally done. We were testing different biologicals. but it’s now become more of a, large scale study just following the behavior of saffron. So for example, last year, a lot of people regionally at least, did not have a very good year. What we found was interesting was that two of our seasons, the most recent and then the one year behind that, did not produce, we’re definitely decreasing in flower number, but the older crop had a good production year. It jumped up from the previous year. So there’s a lot of variability. We think here that the cold temperatures we reached temperatures that could definitely damage, saffron. we get, we can get down to minus fifteen Fahrenheit, minus twenty Fahrenheit as you do in Wisconsin. we also have a lot of rain here. and we feel that that probably impacts it too. So if, if you were to have a nice, dry spring and then a cool wet fall, that would be ideal. but we don’t really see that here. So I think that lends itself to kind of our crazy production patterns. But, it’s made it very difficult to understand what the heck’s going on sometimes. Sure. It’s been amazing. In fact, there was a grower down in Pennsylvania He’s been doing it for quite a few years. He got to the point where he had to dig up his corm, or he wanted to dig up his corms and separate them the year after he separated them. And he had big corms that he had produced. He had an incredible, year. He had, oh, I don’t know, ten thousand flowers, I He said he was staying up until two or three in the morning processing the darn things. And he said, oh Margaret. Oh I don’t know why I’m doing this. And then this year, for whatever reason, that same bed, he got five hundred flowers, that’s all. And he attributed it to maybe it was a wet spring, a dry fall. we we really don’t know what it what causes these great variations? The good thing, though, is he had so much saffron the year before he had enough. You know, it’s not like carrots or some of these other perishable, crops that if you don’t get it, you don’t get it. Whereas this, he still had enough left over from last year that he could, still, satisfy his, customers. So, it’s, still a big question. One of the problems is people are growing all over the country and they all have different kind of soil types, different kind of temperatures, even in little old Vermont. What’s happening up in Burlington, where we are, which is in the north west central is completely different from the southeastern area. And so it’s not as though we can say, oh, Vermont had a really good year or a bad year because it’s the weather is so, localized. And so it’s very hard when growers say, oh, I had a really bad year. It’s hard to know what, what it is that makes that happen. Um, yeah. And in a case of this farmer to, just as an aside, he actually dug up some corms that are request and they look fine. So even though they, didn’t produce well the previous year, they weren’t diseased. They weren’t full of mites or, wireworms or anything like that. They look good. So we’ll just hope that he has a good season this year. So they didn’t put up flowers, but they still put up the foliage. The leaves. exactly? Yes. So they didn’t die? You know, sometimes, obviously, they die. Or the squirrels and chipmunks take them away or the voles, etc.. That wasn’t what was happening in this particular case. I think it’s worth mentioning in Wisconsin, like Vermont, it gets really cold. And so I always start getting nervous in January or February if we don’t have a good snow cover. I worry that the corms could freeze. We had a great snow cover this year. And so I felt that we weren’t going to have any problem. But some years we have a very open winter without any snow. And that’s when I really have a sleepless night or two. So as a home gardener, like if I don’t have that snow cover, should I put straw on the bed or what could I do to like on a small scale to help my corms through that phase? So the trouble with putting straw on there is, oh, the voles and the mice and the chipmunks, they will be so appreciative of making them a nice house and a house with food. I don’t usually encourage that. If I just had a very small plot and I didn’t have much snow. I, think I would let the chips fall where they may. Rich. What would you do? Yeah. I think that’s, true. I don’t think you can really do anything that isn’t going to bring the pests in. Right. You know, if you had a bunch of snow that was outside, you could maybe put some snow on top of it, but it’s kind of nice to keep the leaves sort of out of the snow, though. I’d have to say, when we have snow, those green leaves are totally covered with snow. You can’t see the leaves at all. But if you burrow down under, you can see that the leaves are still green. And as soon as all the snow melts, they perk right up. So for some homeowners, that are doing a backyard thing, we sometimes suggest to people that they try, using milk crates. So the nice thing about milk crates is there’s kind of a mesh around might keep the voles and moles out. And we usually recommend that people cover the inside of the, milk crate with weed cloth or something like that to keep it all in. If you do that, it’s a good idea to bury the, milk crate a little bit into the ground, like maybe five or six inches into the ground so that they get the benefit of the insulation from the soil. One year we thought, oh, well, we’ll just leave the milk crates on top of a bench in a high tunnel. They all froze. They all died. So, in that, that sort of proved the point that they need some kind of insulation, whether it’s the soil around them. Well, and the same. We also had crates in the soil outside. buried a little bit into the ground, and those survived. So anyway, those are different ways of doing it. On that smaller scale, would it be useful to put, say, chicken wire if it’s in the ground, chicken wire over the top. And then, you know, Christian could put straw over the top. Would that be helpful or not? Well chicken it would have to be something like hardware cloth. That’s really small because you got the chicken wire, a mouse or a vole, they can get right through those holes. Even the small the small mesh chicken wire won’t be big enough to, prevent that from happening. There are some people when they make a bed and they might use a raised bed, they dig out the soil. They put hardware. You know what I mean by hardware cloth. Do you know Christian, what hardware cloth is. No I don’t. Okay. And how would you describe hardware cloth. What I most used is quarter inch mesh. Yeah. it’s metal and it’s a mesh and just smaller gauge. So small enough that a mouse can’t get through. Right. Yeah. It’s, like a screen roll. You can get it at any hardware store. So these people put, that hardware cloth down on the ground and then going up the sides because they can, otherwise burrow in. Or they make a wooden frame and they put the hardware cloth on the bottom of that frame. And then the only way these the animals can get in are from the top, and voles and moles are are not likely to go up that way. Then you could use bird netting or something like that over the top. I think that’s a good experiment. Go with the hardware cloth and then put, some hay on top. We’ve never tried that. Just see if that may um prevent freezing or, and reduce it a little bit. So you might ask a grower after listening to this say, oh I’d like to start making big money if I can sell my saffron. When we first started, people said, oh my God, this is the, the golden goose. And we said, no, no, no, start small. And so most growers that succeed with saffron are generally small diversified growers that it’s adding to their, their product line. And, we encourage people to start, if they’re commercial with maybe a thousand or two thousand corms maximum. See how it goes. See if they like it. Sometimes people say, oh, this is such a cool crop. Others say, oh, it’s too fiddly. It’s just different personalities. And the people who succeed at it are people who are intrigued with it. And it’s a beautiful crop, the heavy duty labor period is when all the field crops are pretty much done. So in many respects, it’s like maple syrup in the fall, If maple syrup had to be produced in June and July. Vermont would not have become so famous for its maple syrup because farmers have to get out in the field. Maybe not anymore because we don’t have many farmers. But, it’s good for those farmers that are adding to their diversification, but start small, see if that’s something you like and then proceed from there. I’ll just tell you one story about this Pennsylvania grower. I’ve said it a few times. So he said, Margaret, this is a no brainer. I harvest the stuff, I dry it and I put it in little bags. And what he does is he puts enough in a plastic bag to make one batch of paella or, risotto or something like that. And he sells it for, I don’t know, five bucks, which is probably the equivalent of fifty dollars a gram. And people say, hey, five bucks, I’ll try that for five bucks. And he said, so here’s the thing, Margaret. I plant a bunch of spinach, I tend it. I harvest it, I wash it, I put it in the bag. I take it to the farmers market. Maybe it sells, maybe it doesn’t. If it doesn’t sell, I bring it home. I throw it on the compost heap and it’s lost. Totally lost. I gained nothing from it. The saffron. I take it to the farmers market. Maybe it sells, maybe it doesn’t. If it doesn’t sell, I bring it home. I put it back in the drawer and I take it next week and I’ve lost nothing. And those are some of the little, aspects of saffron that is unique. As a high value crop that makes it worth, trying for, for smaller growers. I have a question kind of circling back a little bit to production since it’s a fall blooming crocus. Are there any other fall blooming crocuses where there could be some hybridization? Oh, I’ll answer that one. Uh, no. It is a sterile plant. The flower is sterile. From a genetic standpoint, it’s triploid. So it can’t form gametes. It doesn’t have an even number of chromosomes so it can’t form gametes. All the regeneration of saffron is at the corm level. So at the corm level, there is no generation of seeds. However, it’s worth noting there are other fall blooming crocuses that you can buy, and they look very similar to saffron, but they usually they don’t have a stigma and they are toxic. So if you go online to say, oh, I want to buy some crocuses and you know that you don’t want a spring crocus, I don’t know the species name right off the top of my head. But, you need to make sure that if you want to grow saffron, you need to get a corm that is crocus sativus, not some of these other ones. So there you have it. The other thing that’s worth mentioning, if someone is interested in getting started in saffron, we have this thing we call saffron net, which is an a free email listserv. There’s about a thousand people from all over the country, and Europe and Asia and Australia and all people interested in growing saffron, either as a home gardener or as for commercial purposes. And people can send me an email and at mskinner@uvm.edu and I will put them on the list. We have several fact sheets, that goes through from planting to harvesting to processing and sampling the corms in the, springtime so that you would have all that information at your fingertips and plus a thousand people that are happy to share their experiences. So a saffron net kind of a discussion group type thing then you could chat or is it more just information type thing? No, ideally it’s a chat thing and there are periods of time when it becomes very active where people say, oh, this flower is calm, or oh, I don’t know what happened, or I want to sell some corms or I want to buy some corms. It’s not some of these, things get way too, we get too many emails. So, it’s edited, it’s a proctored. So I get it. And then if it really isn’t applicable to everybody, then I don’t send it to everybody. Because if people get too many emails, they want to get off it. Ann, is there any additional questions or Christian, you have some. I know we’ve covered a lot of topics here, kind of. I think we definitely want to invite both of you back sometime, maybe this fall, to see how the crop looks. But yeah, Christian or Ann. Any final questions before we wrap up or get some final tips from Margaret and Richard? Yeah, I actually do have a question. So another covering question, in my home garden. What are some other crops or flowers that I could grow on top of the, saffron crocus that wouldn’t hurt them or that could even be beneficial because I don’t have a lot of real estate and I want to get the most out of my garden. And so what kind of suggestions do you have in that respect? Good question. I should say one of the reasons that we had originally looked into using milk crates was because we theorized that people could. If if they were growing in a high tunnel or something, they could just take them out of the high tunnel to grow their higher value crops. We ended up sort of moving away from that. But, the whole idea of co cropping or whatever you want to call it, I think is a lovely idea and I wish we could get enough funding to actually test that. My hypothesis and I know some people have tested different things, some people have said I’ve grown strawberries. And the nice thing about the strawberries is it takes over the bed and so it reduces weed. The weed pressure and the saffron will still come up because it’s a shallow rooting plant. I know people that have, tested growing Basil with success. I think you could probably grow spinach or lettuce. Think shallow rooting crop. I think something like tomato is not a good idea because the root ball is too big, but zucchini or cucumber, I think those would have potential because, they cover the whole area. So you don’t have the problem with weeds because weeds is a big issue for, growers that are growing large areas of saffron, weeds are a problem. And some people who don’t want to do co cropping like you’re describing, they cover the whole, bed with black plastic or a silage tarp. And if it tends to be really hot, then they might put the white side of the silage tarp up so that it, it um reflects the, the sunlight so it doesn’t get too hot underneath. So we use, strips of weed cloth over our beds that are just the, width of the three foot width of our beds. But I think you definitely could grow any of those other crops, very successfully. Is this a flower garden? Just go with the shallow rooted annual to I think would be. Yep. In fact, there are some people who are, you know, that they sell cut flowers and they’ve experimented with planting cut flower annuals, over that. So that’s a really good idea. I’m glad you mentioned that. The thing you have to be a little careful about, if you have really heavy clay soil that tends to hold the. Hold the water. You want to be careful not to over water it because then. Then the the corms will rot. It’s kind of a balancing act there. So, there is encouragement to cover that again, back to that dormant season to cover that, to keep the weeds down, pull that back in that late August, early September to try to get those leaves or the flowers are starting to reemerge. Okay. Exactly. That’s good. Yeah. Good tip. And any other final questions? Um, no, that’s a good question. Like I said, we could go on for for hours. And we have this is our fourth podcast, I think with, saffron. So yeah, we encourage folks to go back and listen to those first original episodes on the cutting edge simply because we covered a lot of the production stuff. But these are good reminders. And I think the questions that Christian has are perfect for what someone that’s getting started. You know, six years ago, we didn’t even know we could grow this stuff. Just one quick question about, um, what’s too cold? I think that when you get, there are lower limits to temperature, that will damage the leaves. So if they’re exposed and not under snow, I, do believe that it will kill the leaves below, probably below minus ten. Minus fifteen. Are you talking centigrade or Fahrenheit? Fahrenheit. But keep in mind that if they’re under snow, they’ll be okay. Really? And just because it’s cold on the top in the air, doesn’t mean it’s cold in the soil. There are people in northern Vermont that are growing it successfully and that’s zone four. Plant hardiness zone. So I think it’s more of an issue actually, not for Wisconsin or Vermont, but there are people that have tried it in Florida and some parts of Texas. It never gets cold enough in some of those areas. So it doesn’t it needs a cold period to stimulate flowering. So if it’s too warm all the time, it won’t do so well. Not not a problem for us, not in our lifetime. I think we don’t have to worry about climate change, occurring that severely. I can just add my observation from this last year because, northwestern Wisconsin, we did get to thirty below. And, we had snow cover. If you go to our wisco.net you have those Mesonet networks that universities, run and you look at soil temperatures there’s one in every county for the most part in Wisconsin. The soil temperatures very seldom got below twenty five degrees. Above zero. But we were thirty below. And I still have those original saffron plants or corms that you sent me, Margaret, six years ago. And they’re green. They’re still, coming. So again, thirty below with, you know, four inches of snow cover because we did lose a little bit just before, we had that cold weather here in Wisconsin and they did survive. So again, I think it’s time for me to probably dig them up and divide them and, see what we have under there. It’s been that five six year time frame, I guess. Cool. Any other questions? Um, you know, there’s one more thing that’s particularly appropriate for Wisconsin and Vermont is how deep you plant them. And in warmer conditions, you can probably plant them a little bit closer to the surface. But for our colder climates, probably planting them at around six to eight inches deep is probably a good idea. That sort of provides that additional, buffer. Uh, the other thing is, some people that listen to this may say, well, where can I get the corms from? And so one of the fact sheets that we have describes where you can get, corms from and lots of times the bigger the corm, the more expensive they are. And people say, oh, well, I want to save money. I’ll get the eight or nines. That’s the circumference in centimeters and that’s too small. The chances of them blooming in the first year is sort of dicey. So it’s better to go with nine tens or ten eleven so that you tend that size. You tend to get close to one hundred percent blooming. That means at least one bloom per corm that you’ve planted. Christian, where did you get your corms from? I got them from a specialized saffron vendor, I think roco. Oh, okay. Yeah. We use cuz I read your I read your resources. There are many other places. But what’s nice about saffron is it’s a small operation. He stands by the quality of his product and, is very careful to get the corms to the United States early because he knows that it gets cold. And so he tries to get those corms out in a timely fashion. They’re great though. There are other lots of times people go online and they find, you know, they get a cheap one. And you don’t know what you’re getting so good. Excellent. Well, I think we’ve had a great discussion. I think Margaret and Richard, if you’re open for it, we’ll probably invite you back. August, maybe September or maybe even October. See how things went or are going. And Christian, I think you’re part of this team now, so we’ll always want to know how things are going in Madison in terms of, southern Wisconsin. And Ann and I are about four hours apart. So we got the state pretty well covered here from corner to corner. So we appreciate everyone’s time. And, for those listening to the Cutting Edge podcast, there’s other podcasts that we have available on, our cutting edge website. So again, thank you, Margaret. Thank you, Richard, and thank you, Christian, for joining us. Ann any final comments? I’m now interested in growing saffron. Here we go. Got another grower. Great. Thank you.

JASON FISCHBACH 49:00
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