Gwenfar Dewines Planhigion @GwenfarsGarden@kith.kitchen

You don't need a field to grow your own #saffron but it really does seem to work better in the ground versus in containers.

As of Oct 18th, morning, the flowers picked are 54 and corms showing is around 125.

I began this bed with just 20 corms a decade ago, and in 2018 I harvested almost 300 flowers, so it is easy to start low-cost and propagate them yourself.

#Saffron Math:

It takes seven individual strands of dried saffron for my jeweler's scale to register .001g. That large mother-of-pearl plate full of drying threads will weigh approximately .02g when fully dry untrimmed.

There's also the thing in saffron culture where the paler 'style' end is trimmed off and then the spice is considered a finer quality and priced higher.

A gram of trimmed saffron can be $20 USD at market, what do you think the growers were paid?

#gardening #economics

Harvest for Saturday Oct 16, eighteen #saffron blossoms! 🤩

There are still some flowers in the morning that are only halfway emerged, and I'll make a second flower pass in the evening. The number of corm tips showing is now over 100.

#florespondence #photography

I left this #saffron crocus blossom undisturbed in my house for 24 hours so that it would get warm enough to open and show you what saffron looks like when it's still in the flower.

#gardening #plants #florespondence

Once the #saffron crocus flower has been picked in the field, the spice itself still has to be harvested.

I like to use the edge of my thumbnail to split the base of the saffron flower and pull everything open from there, yanking out the red stigmas by their common base.

That's it. Dry the red stigmas and you have the spice more commonly known as saffron. Aka zafran, zafferano, safran, kesar, ....

#gardening #food #florespondence

Harvesting #Saffron

The flowers are traditionally picked early, when closed, so the spice isn't exposed to moisture or sunlight. The blossoms wilt after that first day so don't leave them.

Here are the blossoms that were partially emerged last night, and how they were right before I picked them this morning. To pick, you cleanly pinch off the entire flower at the narrow neck below the blossom.

Capitalistic discussion of harvest next.

#gardening #plants #florespondence

New plantings (or sproutings from earlier sowing).
#florespondence

Spring flowers
#florespondence

My fancy, frivolous frou-frou tuberous begonia has been a joy all summer, but never more than right now, when its rich, red flowers are lit up against a background of senescing witch hazel leaves (“Diane”).

#florespondence @plants

Took a pretty long hike today, 17km. The seaside and the trails surrounding it are stunning without tourists around. Yeah, obviously I hate tourists. I've started even hating myself as a tourist, so I'm always trying to live places and not just to visit them.
Here we were really close to Cinque Terre: luckily these places are not that famous so you can still enjoy silence and nature.
And now I'm so tired.
#Italy #WhereILive

This is about heated blankets that you can use sitting in a chair, not electric blankets that you use in a bed.

I've only just come across the idea of a heated blanket. I have #MECFS and my body cannot regulate it's temperature, meaning I get cold very easily even if the central heat is on, & it takes a lot to warm me up again. Getting cold triggers pain. So I wondered if a heated blanket might help, for me to use on when sitting on a chair/sofa, instead of turning up the heating & making my partner too hot.

Do these work? Do they take long to heat up? Anything to look out for/problems?

Obviously I've tried normal blankets, but when I get cold, these can take quite some time to warm me up. So wondering if heated blankets might work a lot quicker?

Just reposting this for daytime in the Americas: #SFFBookClub poll is up at https://doodle.com/poll/7a98sswutwcd7r2v?utm_source=butts&utm_medium=butts

well this is the single most Prince Charles headline I've read in maybe my entire life https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/oct/11/prince-charles-car-runs-on-cheese-wine-byproducts

I have a handful of little glass bottles I saved from various things that I would love to find a use for. One has a dropper top, but 3 or so have good spray nozzles on them. They're only about 75ml size. Seems small for cleaning products and I'm kind of drawing a blank.

What kinds of things do you put in squirt bottles?