A month ago I made my first post about the hydroponic saffron (Crocus sativus).
Here’s the post if you haven’t seen it.

First, I’ll start with the bad news: No saffron for me this year :(
It hasn’t flowered yet, and probably won’t do that for the next months.

Crocus sativus is very boring. It looks absolutely unremarkable, similar to grass, is mostly passive/ hibernates most of the year, and only blooms in late fall for a few days, and then goes back into stasis for the rest of the year.

Also, I had a few fungus gnats here and there, because the bulbs had some kind of skin around them, which is decomposing now. But I don’t see this as a big problem. I already added some beneficial microbes when I planted it, and those do their job pretty well. I just flush the container every few weeks to get out all organic stuff.

The good news is, that most of them look very healthy!
The roots already expanded quite a bit, in a few cases, they already colonized the whole substrate. Especially those in LECA look the best. My biggest one is already ~15 cm tall.

Some things I learned:

• The plants grow very slow, and therefore, don’t like too much fertilizer. I try to keep my EC around 0,5 mS for the winter, and experimentally increase it on one test plant to see how much they tolerate and how they react to it.
• They are boring and passive. I will keep them in pots until I can split the bulbs next year, and then either plant them as co-plants somewhere, or just place them outdoors to save some space and pots.
• You’ll have to be very patient. The amount of bulbs I bought (about 40 pcs) isn’t enough. You need about 100-150 flowers to get one gram of saffron. And those need some space. Growing them indoors feels a bit like waste when I think about what else I could grow instead.

Pictures

My pot with a citrus tree sapling in it:

Here’s a picture from Wikipedia how it might look like when it blooms.