Thank you for your comment. Perhaps you are right, this hadn’t come to my mind. The first year I tried the experiment there were no grey spots and the temperature was slightly higher. The problem however was that the buds developed further and they were thus more ‘open’ at the end of the experiment. If it would solve the problem, that would be worth considering of course. But I decreased the temperature further the last years just to avoid them opening further. The end goal is a cut flower of course and florists want them as closed as possible, although they surely want them to open of course. There have been some experiments with storage at sub zero temperatures even and they claimed to be successful. I do wonder however why then my first box would have been good, they were all stored at the same temperature, the only difference is the duration. But you are probably right, I should try it as well. I guess I can place a box in another cold storage at a higher temperature.

Thank you for your comment. I didn’t know cryoprotectants existed, I might have a look at that in the future, but fogging them seems like an extra task and is perhaps not very easy to do. The research station has stopped work on this, project money ran out. I’ve filled two boxes this year, but I’ll only know the results in August or September obviously. I couldn’t really fill more of them as there was lots of botrytis in the field this year due to the bad weather this Spring. If peonies go into the boxes with botrytis, you cannot expect them to come out of it healthy… With only two boxes, not too many tests can be done, so I’ve opted for ‘slowly’ decreasing oxygen instead of fast as that could be one of the causes of the ‘grey flecks’. And I also won’t go as deep, I want to keep it around or slightly above 5%. I’ve mostly used Coral Charm this time as this variety was resistant to bud botrytis (most botrytis in the field occurred at the bottom of the buds) and because it is a variety which can be cut tight and still opens fine (and much slower than its sister Coral Sunset). I’ll post a article about it somewhere in the Autumn, I hope I can report some good results this time.-