Commercial Floriculture

Harvesting and Yield

• Flowers are ready for harvest in about 3 to 3 1/2 months of planting.
• August-September is the peak period of flowering.
• Depending on the purpose, harvesting is done by cutting the fully-opened spikes from the base or single flowers are harvested as they open by day; the picking of individual flowers should be completed by 8.00 a.m.
• The flowers have a shelf-life of 3 days.
• Flowers yield up to 17-18 t/ha can be expected from a well-maintained crop.

Handling and Packing of Flowers
Loose flowers are transported in poly bags to the nearby whole sale market.
The flower spikes are graded according to spike length, length of the flowering zone and quality of individual flowers
Bunched in round bundles each having about 50-100 spikes
The stem portion of the bundle has to be wrapped with news paper.
To avoid damage of the flowers and buds, the whole bundle may be wrapped with soft, white tissue paper or polythene.
Bundles have to be packed in card- board boxes for long distance transportation.

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Storage of Flowers
The fresh flowers can be stored at 10oC.

Extraction of essentail oil
About 150 kg of flowers are required to produce 1 kg of the brown, semi-solid absolute of Enfleurage.
The extracted flowers will contain some natural perfume and are treated with petroleum ether to obtain the absolute of chassis as a valuable by-product (yield 1.2-1.5%).
In recent years, the process of Enfleurage has been partly replaced by solvent extraction, which requires much less labour though the yield of the absolute reduces considerably.
The extrac¬tion of the tuberose flowers with petroleum ether yields 0.08-0.11 % of concrete, which gives 18-23% of absolute on treatment with alcohol and contains 3% steam distillate.
The concrete yield is about 17-18 kglha which gives 3.5 kg absolute and 0.8 kg distillable oil.

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