The final part of this series on distillation carries on from the basic principles, stages and types of distillation to look at harvesting, selection and design of a distillation system, and the scaling up process.
Harvesting
The method and timing of harvesting crops will depend upon the part of the plant required, the pre-processing preparation required before extraction, the re-growth characteristics of the crop, the changes of chemical constituents in the plant during growth, the diurnal variance of chemical constituents in the plant, the characteristics of the field and the type of enterprise in terms of size, scale and socio-economic environment it operates within.
As essential oils can be sourced from leaves, stems, flowers, bark, wood, fruits, rhizomes or seeds, the nature of the plant material required will have great bearing on the mode of harvesting required.
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