Celery 321
takes about 30–40 days longer than a transplanted one. In the past, blanching was
popular, but due to increasing demand for green celery and the expense involved with
blanching, it is no longer a common practice.
The seed crop of celery behaves biennially in a temperate climate and annually in
a tropical to sub-tropical climate. It takes five months to reach seed maturity in
plains. Celery seed is usually ready to harvest from August to early September under
United State conditions whereas, it is harvested in April–May in Indian plains. The
harvested crop is cured in the sun before threshing. The shattering of seed is a
common problem and can be avoided by timely harvesting of seed in the morning
hours or by spraying poly vinyl acetate (PVA) glue on seed umbels (Desai et al.,
2001; George, 1999).
18.3 Post-harvest handling.....................................................................
Preparations for market include a series of post-harvest operations such as removal
of small lateral branches and damaged leaves, packaging and pre-cooling. All operations
except the last may be done in the field or the packaging plant. The fresh herbs are
stored mainly for short periods to increase availability and to avoid a glut in the
market. Optimum storage conditions for celery fresh herb are 0 ∞C and a high RH
(95%). Controlled atmospheric storage can be used to maintain marketable quality
for relatively long periods. Such storage conditions require a temperature of 0^ ∞C and
high RH in an atmosphere of 1–2% O 2 , 4% CO 2 and with facility of ethylene removal
(Kadam and Salunkhe, 1998).
The seed crop of celery is collected after harvest and allowed to cure under the sun
for a period of about 7–10 days. The cured crop is transported to the threshing floor,
where it is dried in a thin layer for one or two days before carrying out light threshing
to separate the seeds. The shade-dried seed contains more oil content than the sun
dried seed. The seed can be cleaned easily with a screening mill followed by a gravity
separator. The seeds are cleaned, graded through sieving and stored in gunny bags in
a cool dry place. Under Indian conditions 1.4 tonnes/ha of seed can be harvested. The
fresh seed should be taken to an oil extraction unit for more recovery of volatile oil
content (Malhotra, 2005).
18.4 Cultivars..........................................................................................
The cultivars of celery are generally classified as yellow/golden varieties called ‘self
blanching’ varieties or green varieties with dark green foliage. The green varieties
can be further divided into two groups, early and easy to blanch; late and slower to
blanch. The most important varieties are mentioned in Table 18.1.
The different cultivars of celery with salient characteristics as per Tigchelaar cited
by Desai et al., (1997) are:
Clean Cut: open pollinated, duration 125 days from transplanting, excellent shipping
quality, large heavy petioles of good length, relatively few side shoots, similar to
Utah 52–70.
Florigreen: attractive, uniform, vigorous widely adopted green stalk cultivar developed