Time for one of the more obscure things we grow! We’ve harvested the majority of our coriander for the season and it’s been a fantastic season for it!
For the uninitiated, coriander and cilantro are the same exact plant. Coriander is simply the seeds from a fully flowered cilantro plant. Cilantro is one of the most unique plants out there insofar that it can produce both an herb and a spice.
We are surprised that this isn’t more popular, since coriander is one of very, very few spices we can successfully grow so far north. I mean, we get why some of you don’t as you’d rather eat soap! But for the rest of you that love cilantro? We seriously don’t get it! It’s like you think coriander is ruined cilantro!
We started “aiming” for coriander production several years ago now. It’s a challenging plant in the north as we often grow bolt resistant varieties of cilantro to combat our long days and cilantro’s aptitude towards flowering in sunlight. This means we often don’t have enough season to get these bolt resistant varieties to full seed. So, to get coriander, we simply grow also cilantro that is not bolt resistant at all. They are commonly called a “coriander” varieties, but it’s just cilantro without genetic bolting resistance. With these, we typically see the initial stages of flowering in mid June.
The plant will be fairly obvious when it’s time to harvest, the seeds will practically dry on the plant and it’ll look like coriander. We usually see this happen about 70 to 80 days into the season with our variety. The seeds will easily pop off with a bit of finger friction. Immature seeds will still be quite green and these should be left on the plant until they dry naturally.
Once we harvest coriander, we dry it further using air dehydration techniques. This is a fancy way of saying that we spread the seeds out on a cookie sheet, on top of some parchment paper, and let them air dry for a week or more. We want them to be well dehydrated prior to storage as moisture can destroy our stored coriander. We haven’t found much of reason to accelerate the process by using a dehydrator.
We are pretty happy with our harvest this year. Six cilantro plants will easily fill a spice jar for us, so that’ll get us into 2025 and likely well beyond!
