Crocus sativus
Happy Vernal Equinox lovers of the outdoors!
As far as I've noticed, the purple spring crocuses bloomed for the very first time yesterday, right in time to greet the official first day of spring! My friend Heather and I were amazed at their perfect timing! These magical beings open in the sunlight in the late morning and close up to sleep at night or on rainy days. So in honor of our colorful friends, I've decided to make it our plant of the month and write up a brief profile.
The genus, Crocus is botanically in the Iris family (Iridaceae) and includes about 80 species of varying styles. The plants grow from corms, solid, bulb-shaped stem bases that grow underground, storing food and nutrients. This designs them as very hardy perennials, able to withstand a variety of habitats. They can be found in woodland areas, as well as scrub habitats and meadows. The flowers are tube shaped and can be dissected into 3 lobes.They are a great to plant in flowerbeds or around your house because they will return year after year for up to five years, they require little maintenance, and they are a colorful way to start the season. They can be found in a variety of colors, lilac, mauve, yellow and white being most common.Crocuses typically have three stamens, which are the little hairs in the middle of the flower. The spice saffron is obtained from the stamen of an autumn-blooming species. These saffron hairs are picked with tweezers by hand, hence the reason saffron is so expensive. Statistically, the general consensus is that it takes 140 flowers to make just one gram of dried saffron! There is also no substitute for the bitter-sweet unique flavor of saffron.There seems to be varying opinions on the crocus in general as an edible. To be on the safe side, I would deem the only edible crocus as the saffron-producing Crocus sativus,The name of the genus Crocus is derived from the Greek work and is thought to be a loaned word from a Semetic language, such as the Hebrew word karkom, the Aramaic term kurkama, or kurkum in Persian and Arabic, all which mean saffron or saffron yellow.
This is Jason.
ReplyDeleteAnother bulb just breaking soil this time of year is totally edible, very nutritious, very alkalinizing, and has high levels of beta-carotene in the flower, when bloom occurs in mid-summer. The alkaloids are very cleansing to the body, especially in spring when cleansing is most necessary. I am talking about the day lily in its variety of yellows and oranges. Many people who have flower gardens reduce the root mass of their day lilies in the spring when they first start to till the soil, because they have a tendency to spread more than any other flowering plant. For this reason, you may find large chunks of root lying in people's compost or garbage areas. Rather than harvesting from the wild or my own small patch, I look for the abundance of root mass deposited into the waste stream of gardening refuse in the early spring. Last year, there was so much at the community gardens that I started my own patch. One of the surprises of the summer was that one of these root masses had double flowering large orange lilies.
Enough about day lilies. While members of the iris family have a strong irritant in them, they are a beautiful orange color in the root. Mice eat these roots in the fall becoming very swollen and fat, both because of the irritants and the fat and sugar in the root. Though apparently, it gets them through the winter.
I always like to make medicine and food in red green and gold because of the spiritual value of the light spectrum and its importance to the psychology of medicine, even if it is only a placebo effect. The day lilies provide yellow roots and green shoots this time of year, but the rose hips, barberries, and other red plant tissues that are indicative of vitamin C are becoming bleached by the spring rains and warm weather and falling on the ground. If you find that there are no good winter berries left, fear not. The Japanese knotweed will soon put up red spears of new growth that are full of vitamin C and other antioxidants. I often store winter berries in the last cold days of winter, in preparation for the week or so before the Japanese knotweed shoots appear. This way there is always a local source of red color, vitamin C and antioxidants in my diet.
Jason again. I found out that any crocus can be used to harvest saffron. It is important to pick the orange fuzzy parts while the flower is still opening. This may make it a bit late now for most flowers around here. As I harvested some, I understood why it is so expensive. You shouldn't take more than one flower's worth from a planting. Like diamonds, price equals amount of harm done to the ecosystem in extraction.
ReplyDeleteHarvested barberries the other day as well as the first buds of Japanese knotweed. There is an overlap between the last berries of winter and the first vitamin C sources of spring.
ReplyDeleteThanks Jason, you rock! We'll have to experiment to see why they say that they generally use the autumn-blooming crocus species for saffron. Maybe there's a slight difference in flavor? I'll have to go up north to see if I can find some spring crocuses that haven't opened yet!
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