A short update on the ULO long term storage project of peonies. In a terrible peony year with quality far below par you cannot expect better peonies after twelve weeks of storage. So we tried only few stems of second grade to see how far we got. A longer article will follow when leisure is available. Some results: drying them out too much before closing the box is detrimental (see the first image to compare, the overly dried ones didn’t recover, the ones on the left are fin). Botrytis already available in the field will not simply go away in the box but on the contrary develop further. So it is that botrytis damage on the leaflets of Coral Charm shows heavily and the small infections on the buds of Bowl of Cream destroyed most of the flowers. Complaints from customers about these during the cutting season itself were already prevalent, so not really a big surprise. The issue with petals becoming less well attached to the stem in Coral Charm also shows up, although not as much as last year and it seems mostly in the more open buds. This goes some way towards saying there are variety differences. Coral Charm is ok, but twelve weeks seems to be the maximum because of those petals detaching. Bowl of Cream in a normal year without excessive botrytis presence will be fine and opens well. Old Faithful is the best by far, opening very well and with only minor botrytis infections on a very few stems. Too bad it’s such a difficult cut… Rozella is not the best for long term storage, some botrytis as well, but the buds harvested early seem to have dried up somewhat and the others harvested in a more soft advanced state are too far when coming out of the box. Some other standard varieties were also tested with a few stems, both Sarah Bernhardt and Duchesse de Nemours seem able to be kept this way. Although I still have to see how well they open (the two last images were taken only today). OFF-4, which is Old Faithful x Coral Charm, is probably the best variety, showing no botrytis infection and storing and opening well. Problem there is also obvious: there are only about a hundred plants of it, so it will take some time propagating them. And you actually need some four year old plants to harvest semi-double to double flowers, otherwise they are rather single flowered. I suppose other Old Faithful progeny might also be worthwhile testing out, but most of them I don’t grow, so I cannot do it. In general the peony season was very poor quality wise, not only here but in the whole of Belgium and the Netherlands. Some growers cut only half of the normal numbers of stems and very few were kept for long term storage, ULO or otherwise. The ULO box supplier told me the same thing, most growers did not fill their ULO boxes or if they did, only did so for a shorter time, all because of the poor quality. This resulted in some 78% less stems (‘stuks’ in Dutch)) in the month of July at the FloraHolland auctions compared to the previous year (see line 13 of the FloraHolland statistics), which was nice for prices (up 211%), but that was insufficient to make up for the loss of turnover (‘omzet’ in Dutch) from peonies that month (-32%).