Keep Your Flowers Fresh and Pretty Longer
Every florist knows the challenges of creating gorgeous floral arrangements and keeping them fresh for as long as possible. The way you cut, hydrate, style and arrange your blooms all make a difference in how long they will stay fresh and beautiful. Here, the experts at Cascade Floral Wholesale offer some of our best florists’ hacks for keeping your floral arrangements looking good as long as possible. Try a few of these tricks the next time you design beautiful floral arrangements for your home or office and see if they don’t create long-lasting blooms you’ll love.
Give Them a Trim
Before you do anything else with your flowers, the stems should be trimmed. Cutting at an angle, remove about an inch from the bottom. Do this while stems are submerged in room-temperature water. While you have the pruning sheers out, go ahead and remove any foliage that will otherwise be below the water line. This will prevent bacteria from breeding, which can destroy flowers quickly.
Give Them the Water They Crave
Once flowers are trimmed and positioned in water, add flower food to the water. The sugars, acid and nutrients in flower food are essential to maintaining flowers’ freshness as long as possible. Keep in mind that not all flowers need the same amount or temperatures of water, nor do they need them at the same times. For example, placing an ice cube on top of the soil in an orchid’s container every day or two allows the melted water to drip slowly, hydrating continuously throughout the day. Adding a penny to the water of your cut flowers will kill bacteria and fungi, while mixing several drops of vodka and a teaspoon of sugar into your cut flowers’ water keeps them from wilting! For closed buds, place first in warm water for one minute, followed by cold water for 20 minutes and watch blooms open fully.
Give Them a Cute Home
Using unusual, unique, and unexpected containers is one of the fastest ways to show off beautiful blooms in a new way. Consider placing closely trimmed flowers in teacups for a romantic design. Planting succulents in dessert bowls has a similar effect- a small container for a small plant offers a big impact. A cool trick we love is to place a smaller vase inside a larger clear one, then line the space between with unexpected, eye-catching materials like lemon slices, twigs, berries, leaves, or moss. Choose materials that go with the blooms you place in the smaller vase (like sunflowers and lemons for a sunny, monochromatic design). The possibilities are endless when you start seeing potential vases in all of your containers. Add the effect you want with baskets, galvanized metal, wooden barrels, or metal and glass lanterns, and so on.
Give Them Some Space
Try adding some clear tape across the top of your vase. Create a “grid” with your clear tape by placing strips horizontally, then vertically, across the opening of your vase, leaving square spaces in between each piece of tape. The end result is a grid with small openings for each stem, allowing you to control their placement within the vase. This should also create a fuller, wider bouquet, so it works well with large blooms and few stems. You can also try criss-crossing the stems as you add them to a round vase, which will create a rounded display (we especially love this trick with roses or ranunculus).
Keep your flowers looking fresh longer to promote fresh style. Bring the freshness of nature into your own and indulge your own creative spirit when you design a DIY floral centerpiece for your home. Your home will be transformed instantly, leaving you with a sense of pride in your own creativity. Talk to the professionals at Cascade Floral Wholesale for more great ideas about decorating your home, or share your successes with us! We love seeing our beautiful blooms hard at work looking pretty! We’re happy to share our favorite ideas and give you tips about making your designs last as long as possible.