It’s still too early this year to write a full article on my experiences with long term storage of peonies in Ultra Low Oxygen circumstances. There are a few articles on the site that describe results from previous years. They all have in common that I started the year optimistic, but never succeeded. It appears to be the same again this year. I had filled four ULO boxes this year. First one, after two months of storage, went very well, with only 2% of stems which had to be thrown away. Second one however had issues with more than half to be dismissed. Unsure as to what the reason might be, it was not botrytis, though I do have some ‘suspects’. Given that the other two boxes left had received the same treatment as box 2, it seemed logically that they’d suffer the same fate. So beginning of August (the red arrow on the graph) I raised the temperature in my cold storage in a way that I could also use it for other flowers. We raised temperature from 0,5°C tot 1.7°C. In the boxes temperatures have always been slightly higher than this. But as you can see temperatures rose from an average 1.5-2°C there towards 2.5-3°C. Not that the buds opened much more, but relative humidity stabilised at a higher equilibrium from around 75-80% towards 85-90%. And whilst botrytis was nearly absent in the first two boxes, you can see from the image that it was rampant in my third box which I opened the day before yesterday, just short of three months storage. Botrytis was mainly on the foliage, less on the buds, so there are still some good ones, but unfortunately not enough. There’s little point in keeping the last box much longer in cold storage, so next week I’ll probably open the last one after which I can try writing an update on the process. I’d only wish we had good results somewhat faster…