Struggling to make your homegrown flowers last in a vase? Read this
You’ve grown the flowers- yay!
But when you cut them and put them in a vase on your kitchen table within a couple of days there’s petals everywhere, the water’s gone green and gunky and your flowers look very very, very sad.
Not the joyous pop of colour you’d hope to have brightening the house for at least a week!
Here are my five top tips for cutting and conditioning your homegrown flowers so they last longer in the vase and bring you joy right through the week!
Timing
The ideal time to cut your flowers is when they are most turgid (filled with water). Ha, I bloody love that word! Takes me right back to A level Biology.
So you have a choice, either late at night once the sun has gone down, you’ve watered your plants and they’ve had a good drink. Or first thing in the morning before they’ve lost a lot of their water to the sun.
Now I know you're busy and likely have other people to consider in your life as do I. So the way I’ve found to make this work (because there ain’t no way I’m getting up before dawn in the Summer) is to make it the first thing on my list for the day once everyone else has been dealt with. So pack everyone off to school and then get harvesting. If your kids are older and can be left happily munching their cheerios, why not take your morning cuppa outside and cut and condition your flowers then?
Clean buckets and secateurs when harvesting
When I say clean, I mean like you want to eat your dinner off them clean! Take your bucket, secateurs, some bleach and a scourer and scrub them to within an inch of their life!
If you've got any bits of gunk, dust or old flower material on them, not only can you transfer diseases between plants on the secateurs, but the minute the flower sucks the water up from the bucket, the gunk will go up into the stem of the flower, block it, and stop the flower taking up any more water. And guess what no water means? That’s right, dead flowers!
Cut your stems at a 45 degree angle
When you harvest your flowers from the plant try to cut them at a 45 degree angle. This means that when the point of the flower stem sits on the bottom of the bucket or the vase, the water can still get up inside the stem to hydrate the flower. Meaning longer vase life for your flowers.
If you cut straight across the stem the water will struggle to get up inside it and your flower will be parched!
TIP If you’ve already harvested your stems then you can re-cut them at 45 degrees before putting them into your buckets for their long tepid drink (see below).
Strip all of the lower leaves off the stem
Once you’ve harvested your flowers you need to strip all the lower leaves off the stems.
The reason for this is two fold.
Firstly, it stops the stems from having to hydrate the leaves that you won’t see in your arrangement. Meaning that the water can go to the flowers and keep them looking good in preference.
And secondly it will keep the water in your vase much cleaner if you’ve removed the lower leaves. Cleaner water means longer vase life for your cut blooms
Use clean tepid water to let them have a drink
Much like us on a hot day after vigorous exercise (ahem, the most vigorous my exercise ever gets is digging a new planting hole for my latest garden centre purchase!) Once cut and de-leafed your flowers need time to have a long drink in clean, tepid water. Ideally put them somewhere shady and cool so they flowers keep as much water inside them as possible.
The temperature of the water is crucial. Using very cold water will shock the flowers causing them to die more quickly. This might mean mixing some warm and some cold water in your bucket before adding your flowers. Bear in mind that by cutting your flowers you are shocking them anyway, so ease them into their new location gently (i.e. don’t plunge them into freezing cold water!) and they’ll reward you with looking beautiful for longer.
Once they've had their long drink, it's time to get arranging.
Need some help knowing what flowers to include to increase the wellbeing impact of your arrangement?
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