Three Methods Of Flower Preservation Widespread Among Florists

By Author: Priscy Mike
Total Articles: 9
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In another post, we touched lightly on the various methods that are used to keep flowers fresh after they are picked from gardens. In this post we will elaborate on three of those in greater details.

The ritual of sending flowers by post is not very old, whenever there is a social occasion or the need to express personal emotions to someone; we use flowers as our medium of choice. Flowers are the best conveyor of human emotions and they are good at communicating a wide array of emotions ranging from love and happiness to more complicated ones like sadness or condolence. No matter what we use flowers for; they never fail in their commission of expressing human emotions. It is amazing how a rose grown in the United Kingdom can travel half way around the globe to the farthest point on earth and convey messages with the same emotions as if the person was present in flesh and blood. Sending flowers by post UK is not as easy as clipping the flower from the shrub and mailing it; there are more things that are done to keep them nice and fresh.

So ...
... what do they do to keep flowers fresh and soft, ready to be ordered and dispatched?
The secret of preserving flowers is in keeping it moist and cool. There are several ways of doing that, some that have very little modification since the day of invention, others are new age, high-tech! But at the core, they are all unified by fact that at the end of the day, flowers must remain garden fresh and smell wonderful. Some preservation methods are cheap making it affordable for any florist to use them, while some are very advanced in their use of technology, which adds to the cost of maintenance but safeguards the freshness longer. We will see three of these today.
Typical Cold Storage Facilities: Typical cold store facilities are not the most scientific or the most efficient ones available. Success of this method depends on airflow in and around the pellets containing flowers. It may take more than a day for the cold air to lower the temperature of flowers and arrest the process of decay that begins as soon as flowers are picked from the field. Usually, decay rate outpaces the speed of cooling placing lower in the list of effective storage systems.
Artificially Induced Cooling: Similar to the method we just described, this one also works along the same principle of cooling the consignment before decay sets in. This is much more effective than traditional storerooms because here a jet of cold air is blown in from different angles which hasten cooling significantly. The efficiency is increased by orienting the flower pellets better and drawing refrigerated air unlike typical cooling which uses room temperature air to lower the heat.
Refrigeration: When everything else fails, this method is used as the last resort. Refrigeration is much better than the other two processes described here and requires the use of equipments to lower the temperature. But just low temperature is not enough; you would need to keep the moisture content intact. This can be done by blowing in strong jets of most air at low temperature.