Roses do not become oil through machinery. They become oil through forty years of pruning, compost, irrigation, prayer over the soil, and a thirty-day harvest that decides a year. This is how we farm in Ardıçlı.
“We don't grow roses. We grow soil — the roses follow.”
The Damask rose at Ardıçlı sits on alkaline calcareous soil at 1,050 metres. We feed it through living humus, biodynamic preparations and rotational green manure — not synthetic NPK. What you smell in the bottle is, first, what we put back into the earth.
From late winter pruning to autumn compost. The roses bloom for thirty days; the work spans every other day of the year.
Pruned once per year, after winter. Soft pruning only — never severe. The cut sits one centimetre above the bud. Pruning shears are disinfected between plants.
Pruning waste is removed from the field each season — never burned. It feeds the compost pile.
We do not buy compost. We make it — from rose distillation leftovers, garden waste, manure from clover-grass-fed cows, hay and straw, and earth from the farm.
Our method is Controlled Quality Composting. Aerobic windrows, max 3 m wide × 1.5 m tall. Constant moisture 55–60%. Turned with adequate equipment when CO₂ rises above 12%. After six to eight weeks, the pile is fragrant, crumbly humus — alive, ready to be returned to the soil.
Damask rose can grow without irrigation — but a non-irrigated field yields about 500 kg of flower per dönüm. With drip irrigation, it can reach one tonne. We only use drip.
Biodynamics is not a marketing word here. It is a practice of burying cow horns filled with manure in autumn and digging them up in spring. Of stuffing yarrow into stag bladders. Of stirring horn silica in 25 litres of water for exactly one hour before sunrise.
Preparations are stored in dark, cool jars or earthenware — they improve with age. The two spray preparations — horn manure (500) and horn silica (501) — must be stirred rhythmically for one hour, then sprayed onto moist soil before rain.
The soil that drinks them holds water and nutrients more easily, structures itself, and forms more humus.
A complete biodynamic toolkit. Each preparation has a precise role — in the compost, in the soil, in the plant.
Picking begins around 4:00 AM in mid-May and ends mid-July. Always by hand. Always before the sun reaches the petals. Each picker carries a calico bag; flowers are weighed at the field-edge by name and trip — the foundation of our Fair-for-Life traceability.
Children never harvest. The Çocuk Dostu Alan child-friendly space runs daily during these weeks — ten metres from the field, run by a social service specialist.
One picker, on a strong day, brings in 25 kg. A field of ten people delivers 250 kg before noon. The flowers ride to the still within four hours of being cut.
Numbers we measure each year, and the targets that anchor them.
We host researchers, students and partners in Ardıçlı — during harvest and outside it. If you grow roses elsewhere, write us. We share what we know.
This page reflects the practices documented in our internal handbook AG-T-EK-01 Üretici El Kitabı and our biodynamic preparation manual Demeter Production. Both are reviewed annually under our Fair for Life and UEBT compliance.