DIAMOND CROP SAFFRON/ Photo feature by Mansoor Qadir

 

Girls seen busy in removing red carpel from the saffron flowers.The saffron flowers bloom in the month of October and November every year in Kishtwar district of Jammu and Kashmir. These flowers are plucked early in the morning  before sunshine and then stored properly . The three red carpel flowers are called saffron, where as three yellow carpel flowers are called safranin or Patti in local language. After storing for two or three days the red and yellow carpel are removed from the flowers and dried in the autumn sunshine. The saffron is then separated in three varieties–mongra, turla and lachha. While as mongra is the red part trimmed from the white stem, turla forms the white stem and lacha is the whole stem along with red carpel dried together without arranging them is called lachha.Mongra is the best type of saffron with local market rate two thousands per 10gm on season and some times goes up to 5 thousands when the crop yield is low.