Crocus - a flower of incredible beauty

The flower of crocus (also called its saffron) is an onion plant and belongs to the family of iris (tangent). Flowering crocuses is an incredible beauty.

Crocus is a flower that enjoys the love of almost all growers. After a long winter, crocuses, like other primroses, meet the early spring, and in October they finish the season, pleasing their eyes with bright colorful hues before the coming long winter. Crocuses are a flower of open ground, but like other bulbous plants, they can be extruded and thus get "blooming fields" at home.

Crocuses are low bulbous plants (up to 25 cm), their leaves are narrow and grow together with flowers directly from the corms. The leaves and stem of the flower from below are covered with thin transparent scales. Crocus flower is a same-sex, with a corolla-shaped colorful six-parted perianth. Inside the flower hides a stigma with 3 stamens, painted in bright orange, yellow, red colors. These flowers are pollinated by insects. Painted they can be in cold purple and blue, or yellow, warm colors, you can often meet and white crocuses.

Surprisingly, but the crocus bulbs are edible. They are boiled, baked or stewed. But the most precious part of the plant is the stigma. It is the stigma with the stamens that are a valuable medicine, a dye and seasoning - saffron.

Crocus (flower) - care

You need to choose a healthy planting material to grow a beautiful, healthy crocus. This flower should have a bulb without rot, healthy, without any mechanical damage, with an even color, without stains.

When planting these colors, it is important to choose the correct location. Crocuses grow well in the penumbra, but give flowers larger and develop better in areas well illuminated by the sun. But you should not grow crocuses in places where water is retained for a long time, so the bulbs will quickly rot.

Crocus develops well on any air-permeable, cultivated soils. On clayey heavy soils, sand, peat must be applied, and drainage should be provided with the help of fine gravel. On a light soil it is better to make sod land, quality humus. It is desirable to lime the acidic soils.

Crocus, care for which is not a very busy occupation, is quite resistant to changes, cold. Lowering the temperature, it can withstand up to -18 C, but if there are some plantations for the winter, then they must be covered with a layer of peat or foliage.

Typically, additional watering crocuses do not require. They are aware of the lack of moisture in shallow flowering. In this case, it is better to water them moderately.

For good flowering and development, these flowers need to be fed. A good fertilizer for them is compost soil or humus. Such fertilizer is usually applied when preparing the land for the forthcoming crop.

Crocuses in the home environment

Growing crocuses in pots at home is a very fascinating and interesting activity. The purpose of such forcing is to get a blooming crocus at home in winter or, as it happens more often, to a certain date. Pick for bulbs bulbs of one size and one variety, so that in the pot they were the same in height and bloomed at one time.

For forcing, a crocus bulb is dug from the earth on the street in the area of August-September. The bulbs are then kept at a temperature of 20-24 ° C for about two weeks. Then they need to be stored.

It is not always possible to force the crocus to blossom by a certain date. After all, it depends on the type of the flower, on the size of its bulb, on external factors, but it is still possible to determine the approximate time.

Approximately a few weeks after the flowers were brought into the room, under optimal conditions, crocuses will bloom and bloom for about 2 weeks. Be sure, after flowering, you should continue to water them until all the leaves are dead. Then you need to remove the bulbs from the bowl, put them into storage. Then the whole cycle repeats in the same way. True, with repeated forcing crocus flowers are a little bit smaller and weaker.