We love hearing about how much you love your bouquets! With that in mind, I’d like to offer some tips and tricks shared with me so that you can make your flowers last even longer!
For a long-lasting cut flower, it all starts on the farm. We do our best to keep our flower buckets clean, our snips sharp, and cut flowers in cool, dark places before they’re made into bouquets and set out for you.
After you take home a dreamy bouquet of your choosing, there are a few steps you can take to ensure long vase life. First, make sure your vase is absolutely clean. Farmer Rebecca shared the adage with me: “keep your vase as clean as your teacup.”
You can cut the stems 1/4″ once you get home; this gives your flowers a great, happy start to their life in a vase. You can cut the stems daily and replace the water, too, if it works for you!
Recipe to extend the life of cut flowers
Cut flowers enjoy a combination of things in their water – some food, a bactericide, and slight acidity. Sounds tricky, but can be easily done with home ingredients! To accomplish this, you can add a tiny bit of sugar, a tiny bit of bleach, and a tiny bit of citric acid to your vase water. The sugar feeds the plant, the bleach eliminates bacterial build-up, and the citric acid will keep the water ever-so-slightly acidic. You can buy citric acid at any grocery store if you don’t have it already!
Clean water is crucial
If the water gets murky, the flowers will try to drink up the murk, the stems get clogged up, and you can imagine how the flowers begin to change. Cut flowers will always prefer a cool, shady place. They don’t like hot spots, open windows, or bright direct light.
Ultimately, flowers can’t stay the same forever. Part of their magic is the ephemeral nature of their bloom. We watch them open with youthful eagerness, care for them, and see them through to their end — perhaps we see them next summer. As with other things in this life, they were not meant to last forever, so we cherish them while we can.
– Intern Caitlin
(she/her/hers)
