Learn how to extend the life of your fresh flowers with these 10 simple tips!

One of the most common things we get asked when we are out with our fresh flower bouquets is, what’s the care for these? “How do I keep these beauties alive?” “How do I make these last as long as possible?”

Believe it or now there are a few simple ways to extend the life of your fresh flowers, even if you pick them up from our stand or you’re gathering from your own garden.

The trials and errors that we have experimented with in the past 5+ of growing flowers has brought me the compilation of this simple list of tips.

10 Ways to Extend the Life of your Fresh Flowers

So you’ve purchased one of our fresh flower bouquets at market or are just gathering your own flowers from your garden. Here are 8 ways to extend the life of your fresh flowers.

1. Harvest your flowers in the cooler parts of the day, like early morning or evening. This ensures that they are less stressed from heat and sun when being picked.

2. Choose blooms that are only slightly opened up enough to be able to identify the color that it will be, to cut. These will last the longest in your vase. Flowers that are more open attract pollinators and this will make your flowers fade quicker.

3. Cut your flowers at an angle so they can get as much water up the stem as possible. With real thirsty flowers like hydrangeas and lilacs I will cut an X in the bottom of the stem to increase the area of water absorption.

4. Strip the bottom 2/3 of foliage from the stem. Any leaves in the water can create bacteria, making the flowers fade faster.

5. Speaking of bacteria in the water, make sure your vase or vessel is really clean. I clean all of our buckets/ vases with bleach to get them as clean as possible. If you don’t think this will matter, try an experiment. Toss some flowers in water in a kinda dirty bucket and then place some in a super clean, bleached bucket and watch how long your flowers last in each bucket.

6. Use cold water, sometimes, I’ll even leave a little of the bleach water in the bucket to ensure it to be the cleanest, and add a teaspoon of sugar.

7. Change your water daily for the cleanest drinking water for your flowers. I also re-trim the stems, cutting them at an angle while they are out of the water too.

8. If your are waiting to use your flowers or want to freeze time for them, stick their stems in water and set them in the refrigerator. This will hault them from blooming until you need them. Peonies are the best for this method. I’ve had them wait for me in the refrigerator for up to 4 months!

9. Once in a vase, be sure to set your flowers out of direct sunlight or candle flame.

10. Once your petals start to fall, collect to either press them or dry them to make some eco friendly confetti.

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