Bespoke Harvesting Tools

The best quality chamomile tea contains only the flower heads as they are the part of the plant richest in essential oil and active constituents.  We aim to remove extraneous material such as petals, leaves and stems at each stage of processing, starting with harvesting.  To achieve this efficiently we designed our own harvesting rakes in-house.  The rakes consist of a series of fingers that are pulled through the plants to remove only the flower heads with minimal stalk.

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Custom-Designed Chamomile Drying System

Chamomile requires careful drying to remove the water content from the flowers while preserving the volatile essential oil.  A constant stream of warm air is blown through the fresh flowers at high pressure to evaporate the moisture from the harvested material.  Conventional crop dryers operate at high temperatures and remove the moisture too quickly leading to a loss of essential oil and a reduction in the quality of the dried crop.  We developed our own drying system to dry the chamomile to within specific parameters of temperature, airflow and air pressure.  A thermostatically-controlled burner heats the incoming air and maintains the desired temperature to dry the flowers as efficiently as possible while avoiding unnecessary fuel use.

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