Our first saffron bed

Growing premium quality, sustainable, organic saffron takes dreaming, planning, and a lot of time with our hands in the soil! We feel privileged to be able to cultivate and care for the hundred acres that’s been in our family for thirty years. Spending time on this land, you get to know the contours and smells, like the minty tang of pennyroyal along the waterways and the sweet waft of ripe blackberries in late summer hedges. On the dewy June morning that we began constructing our first saffron bed, the scent of our freshly turned reddish-brown soil rose from the prepared ground. For this bed, we chose a twenty-by-three hundred-foot strip of land in the corner of one of our arrow-shaped fields, nestled against one of the watercourses that sends winter runoff to nearby Kelly Creek. 

After clearing and smoothing this strip of ground, the first step was to begin assembling a hardware cloth “cage” to protect the saffron corms from gophers, moles, and ground squirrels. Without this cage, our saffron corms would quickly be a juicy free meal for the underground critters. But hardware cloth doesn’t come in rolls twenty feet wide, and with everyone building their home chicken coop during the early months of the COVID19 pandemic, even the four-foot-wide rolls were hard to come by. So we got rolls in widths of three and four feet and began assembling them using cage clips. Pinching thousands of cage clips with a pair of pliers quickly brings the fatigue of repetitive motion, and it took several different pairs of hands to assemble five three-hundred-foot strips of hardware cloth and put on the eighteen-inch-high sides of the bed. We kept at it—even trudged out to the field in the rain to work on it—but had to quit when we couldn’t see the hardware cloth through the mud. It took several weeks of steady work, but through perseverance of family members and work crew, the cage for the bed was completely assembled.

The hardware cloth cage, of course, will only keep out the close-to-the-ground pests. While saffron corms are tasty to underground rodents, the leaves and blooms are vulnerable to deer. And we have a lot of deer in these parts! So the next step was putting in posts for a perimeter fence to keep deer out and support the cage. We spent a lot of time salvaging old T-posts—straightening them, cutting them to appropriate lengths, and then finally pounding them into the ground at ten-foot intervals around the bed.

With the structure of the bed in place, it was time to fill it with soil. We began with putting back the soil that we had originally dug out when we cleared the land for the bed. That sounds simple, but only some of it was possible to do with earth-moving equipment. In order to spread the soil within the bed without damaging the cage, we had to shovel it out by hand. This work has really made us appreciate how important it is to keep our hands healthy and strong! We sure were glad when we finished that round of shoveling, especially since we had typical August triple-digit temperatures that week. 

The next step was to apply fertilizer. Since we’re growing organic saffron, we never apply chemical fertilizers, but when our August delivery of composted cow manure arrived from a local dairy, we were delighted to find it some of the richest, darkest, soil amendment we’ve ever seen. Unfortunately, it meant more hand shoveling, but after hundreds of yards of soil, moving that light and fluffy compost was almost a pleasure. And we always derive a great deal of satisfaction from adding fertility to our soil; it’s a little bit like eating a meal you know is highly nutritious and sustainably sourced. Of course, it wouldn’t be farming without a few equipment hiccups along the way; on the day we wanted to till in the compost, the small tractor needed to be jumped for every start! But it came through—we finished the tilling and the bed was prepared. 

We picked up our organically grown saffron corms in Seattle on August 27th, freshly shipped from Sativus in the bulb flower-growing capital of the world—the Netherlands. The fat, juicy brown corms looked so vibrant and healthy, even in their little dry tufted coverings and after a trip halfway around the world. They felt cool and heavy for their size in our hands. Eager to begin our September planting, we drove our canopied Dodge long-bed pickup back to the farm packed to the gills with the boxes of corms.

One of the reasons we expect saffron will grow well in our area is we have a hot and dry summer that extends into early fall. The saffron might like that hot summer, but it sure makes putting corms in the ground dusty and dirty work. But this was the part where our hands were really in the soil, which was so loose that we couldn’t use any sort of bulb planting device to put down the corms. Instead, more shoveling. We dug a trench, set a row of corms, filled the soil back onto the corms, and gave them their first watering. It was tricky to dig our planting trenches to the right depth and keep our spacing consistent. After trying a few different versions of a marked spacer board, we finally got into a rhythm of planting with two people placing corms and one person shoveling. It was slow going at first—our first ten feet of corms spaced four inches apart took six hours! Before long, however, we managed to cut that time in half. Planting also sped up when we shifted the last sixty feet of our bed to a six-inch spacing of the corms. Starting September 1st, we planted 37,000 corms and finished the last row ten days later with a great sense of accomplishment.