AS far as harvests go, 2016 was not great but North East saffron growers Shirley Brightwell and Brian Jones are taking it in their stride.
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Mr Jones planted 20,000 bulbs, corms, in 2014 sourced from Tas-Saff in Huonville, and he and Ms Brightwell picked 6000 flowers in the first year.
No early autumn frosts this year has hampered flowering.
A warm and dry autumn is expected to result in about 7000 flowers this harvest, with cold nights and warm days ideal growing conditions for the delicate flowers, which are a delicacy in the food industry.
Saffron flowers for about six weeks to the end of May, and each plant is harvested for the three threads inside, which is dried and packaged.
Apart from the dryer, it is all manual labour.
A good picker can harvest 1000 flowers an hour. It then takes a further two hours to process.
"You don't get much at all and the end of a busy day, just three little threads,” Ms Brightwell said, “it’s fiddly work.
“... and the waste product we put in the compost.”
They snip the flowers, usually in the morning, and then at night trim the stamen and dry them.
Ms Brightwell said consumers could identify genuine saffron by the colour and appearance of the stamen.
“Ideally you want a bit of colour variation in it, and stamen intact, but you don't want too much length,” Ms Brightwell said.
“You know its the real deal when you can see three threads and the change in colour up the stamen. It's very hard to reproduce.”
Mr Jones, who has been farming at Peechelba all his life, previously operated a cropping and sheep enterprise and still runs 350 crossbred ewes with a move back towards stock.
He converted a former pigsty into his saffron bay, which covers the size of two and a half tennis courts.
The planting is likely to expand to accommodate the multiplying corms in coming years.
“They had a meeting in Myrtleford a while back and I missed it so went over with my daughter to see the operation in Tasmania,” Mr Jones said.
“It didn’t really take off in Myrtleford, it is pretty labour intensive and their set-ups were more suited to the mechanical side of things.”
He put up a rabbit proof fence to protect the flowers, but birds and bugs can damage crops.
The threads are packaged and sold in 100 milligram packets, with about 25 in each packet.
The couple sell their Peechelba Produce saffron at farmers markets across the North East.