We can finally demonstrate our cilantro and coriander production. As many of you know, these two come from the same plant where cilantro are the leaves whereas coriander are the seeds. It’s the great exception where both an herb and spice originate from the same plant.
Over the years of subarctic growing, we’ve learned to separate the cultivation of cilantro and coriander into two different goals. In the lower 48, this isn’t necessary as you easily have enough season to pursue both with the same plant.
The goal with cilantro is slow bolting varieties, to maximize the time of meaningful harvest over the summer prior to bolting and flower/seed production. We’ve found the Calypso variety to be our favored type, it’s the slowest to bolt variety we’ve found. The problem is this challenges the production of coriander in our short season, since we often don’t have enough time to produce actual coriander. Calypso’s time to seed is greater than 120 days, more time than we have in our entire season.
So, for coriander, we basically grow any variety of cilantro that is not bred for slow bolting. In this case, we selected an Indian Coriander, which pretty much gets straight to flowering and thus coriander production!
The maturity states of our two types of cilantro is stark at this point! We’ve got plenty of tasty, leafy cilantro and are also well on our way to ample coriander production at the same time!
While we could compromise with a less slow-bolting cilantro variety, it’s not any more difficult for us to grow two types. Separating the production into two different varieties ensures we don’t have to compromise on either, we can have the best of both worlds!
