Menashe Cohen - Northern R&D, Israel

Gregory Yom Din - Open University of Israel - Department of Management and Economics

There is a lack of herbaceous peony cut flowers in the world market in late winter/early spring. Quality of these prestige flowers when cultivated in warm climate regions and stored in cooling chambers during dormancy is influenced by pre-dormancy, dormancy, and after dormancy conditions. We studied various regimes of peony dormancy with constant and alternating temperatures. Containers with plants of cv. ‘Sarah Bernhardt’ were exposed to pre-dormancy temperature of 15°C and in two weeks transferred to cooling chambers to keep dormancy under four various constant or diurnal temperature regimes. In three various dates plants from each treatment were transferred to the greenhouse for release of dormancy and beginning of sprouting. During commercial harvest, data of height of stems, thickness of buds, number of harvested flowers per plant, and dates of harvested flowers were collected. Using these data, the index of market quality of peony flowers was defined and regressed on dummy variables that reflected chilling regimes and dormancy duration. Significant positive differences in market quality were shown between the treatments with the lower storage temperatures 2°C, 2-10°C, and 2-15°C, and the reference treatment with a storage temperature 2-20°C. Significant positive differences were shown also between the treatments with the shorter storage of 6 weeks 4 days or of 8 weeks, from the one side, and the reference treatment with the storage of 9 weeks 3 days. The results between the treatments with the constant temperature 2°C and with the diurnal alternating temperature 2-10°C were close each to another. Therefore, farmers can expect economic gains from saving energy during dormancy under the suitable temperature regime.