Studies on Short-term Storage of Leafy Vegetables in Zero Energy Cool Chamber with Gravity Fed Micro-Dripper Watering System

Leafy vegetables (greens) are highly perishable and need immediate storage in a favourable environment after harvest for maintaining their freshness and marketability. Their importance is now-a-days gaining momentum among the consumers because of various health benefits. However, farmers are not interested to grow leafy vegetables due to their high perishability and lack of proper storage facilities which force them to sell their harvested material immediately at a lower price, resulting ultimately in reduced net profit to the growers. An attempt has therefore been made in this paper to study the feasibility of using a low cost and very low energy consuming storage device for short-term storage of leafy vegetables of about 1 week and to encourage the farmers to go for cultivating greens in a small scale mostly in their back yard for achieving nutritional and livelihood security. One such storage device used for the present study is zero energy cool chamber, developed at Indian Agricultural Research Institute, New Delhi. Zero energy cool chamber for this study was modified by incorporating a gravity fed micro-dripper watering system for uniform and continuous wetting of sand bed. A zero energy cool chamber constructed in coastal area of Odisha i.e. at Bhubaneswar was used to study the storability of most prevailing leafy vegetables such as amaranthus, spinach and coriander during April-May 2015. It was found that amaranthus, spinach and coriander could be stored 7, 4 and 2 days in the marketable form in zero energy cool chamber under coastal conditions compared to 2, 1 and 1 day in room condition (temperature, 23–27°C and Rh, 50–60%) respectively during summer period.