ISLAND LIFE

Patrick Noonan’s broad smile belied the laborious task at hand when he was photographed recently holding saffron bulbs at his family’s farm at Glaziers Bay.

The 22-year-old farm manager, whose parents Nicky and Terry Noonan own boutique saffron producer Tas-Saff, spent more than eight hours raking the soil as workers planted thousands of bulbs on 0.5ha of prime soil at the Noonans’ farm overlooking the Huon River.

“Most of the workers were planting, but I was raking – opening up the beds and then closing them over,” says Noonan, who recently completed a horticultural business degree at the University of Tasmania.

“I got super burnt that day. It’s hard on your back but rewarding.”

Some of the saffron, which will be harvested over a 40-day period in autumn, will be used in new Tas-Saff products, including a saffron-infused gin (a collaboration with Rex Burdon from Nonesuch Distillery), honeycomb and Turkish delight flavoured with saffron, as well as soaps and candles.

The spice is derived from the dried stigma of the flower of the saffron crocus. Per weight, it is worth more than gold and is also said to have medicinal benefits.

Terry Noonan says Tas-Saff doesn’t use any chemicals and adopts biodynamic practices to grow the saffron. “The finest quality saffron, like ours, is painstakingly picked by hand and last year we picked more than two million individual stigmas or threads, as they are sometimes known,” he says.

To extract 1kg of saffron from crocuses, the stigmas of almost a quarter of a million flowers must be picked.