A weedy species in agricultural areas and an attractive wildflower in nature: Common poppy (Papaver rhoeas L.) – Can it be used for fruit preservation in the future?

Weeds are the plants growing where they are bot desired and are notorious yield reducers that are responsible for significant crop yield and quality losses in agricultural areas. Common poppy is one of these plants. As can be understood from the title, the purpose of this study was to test the possibility of using fruit extracts of common poppy (Papaver rhoeas L.) for the preservation of fruit quality. The experiments were conducted with apricot fruits cv. ‘Şalak’. Two different concentrations (0.5% and 2.5%) of P. rhoeas fruit extracts together with an un-treated control treatment were tested in the current work. Studies were carried out with three replications for each treatment, where each replication consisted of six individual fruits. Studies were continued for 42 days and the fruits were stored at 0.0±0.5 °C with 90-95% relative humidity. Different quality parameters of apricot fruits were measured and noted with 7-days interval. It was found that the hypothesis of current research was acceptable, where the fruit extracts of P. rhoeas were found to reduce weight loss at the apricot fruits, help to reduce disease severity, maintain visual quality of the fruits, reduce the chilling injury and fruit firmness and significantly influence the ascorbic acid content by delaying its reduction. Overall, findings of current work suggest that the P. rhoeas fruit extracts have ability to maintain postharvest quality of apricot fruits and further studies are required to determine the exact mechanism and the responsible constituents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]