Tips for drying flowers? (Not the usual kind)

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Hey Folks

I’ve now left the wonderful world of cannabis, and I’m now deep into other flowers.

I’m helping run a flower farm and I need to dial in some procedures for drying excess flowers and hopefully full bouquets (great upcharge for perfectly preserving someone’s wedding flowers).

Obviously air drying is easiest, but it tends to both wreck the color as well as the texture.

Freeze drying is expensive, but definitely an option I’m curious about.

Chemical drying/rehydration with PEG seems most interesting, but colors tend to bleed.

Just wondering if anyone has any thoughts on this Tek?

https://patents.google.com/patent/EP1290940B1/en

Basically it involves drying with acetone, then “rehydration” with PEG.

This was also somewhat interesting, just silica and oven for 2.5h

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/360313529_Vacuum_drying_a_new_technique_for_drying_ornamental_flowers_and_bracts

Silica and vacuum oven

https://journalijpss.com/index.php/IJPSS/article/view/2520/5044

I thought I’d combine a few of these teks.

Let me know what you think of this.

Chill acetone/isopropyl to -60c

Dip flower into solvent, or perhaps into liquid nitrogen first (expensive).

Allow flowers to freeze, while hopefully replacing the water with solvent, and also not pulling color. Soak.

Remove.

Place in glycol/glycerin solution in vacuum oven.

Put under vacuum to boil off solvent, hopefully replacing the acetone with the preserving solution.

Quick solvent wash to remove sticky residue.

OR

I was also thinking I might just be able to put the flowers into a PEG/glycerin mix, and then just warm and vacuum, and hopefully the water would just boil off that way. My only concern would be pigments leeching into the preserving fluid.

This thread made me think that color leeching is kinda the same issue we had with pigmented oil and cannabis. And that colder solvent would potentially pick up less pigment.

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I have never tried this myself, but I have a feeling that using acetone/isopropanol to pull the water out of a flower is going to get expensive quickly. Mostly because you won’t be able to indefinitely reuse the solvent - it’ll get saturated with water and eventually won’t remove the water from the next batch of flowers. Cool project though, my vote is for freeze drying.

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Yeah, a couple papers talk about using molseives in the solvent to keep it charged.

It sounds like a pain in the ass, although compared to cannabis I’m dealing with both less volume and less water by weight.