How to make your cut flowers last.

Hello everyone,

The garden is full of beautiful blooms and I'm cutting sweet-peas by the bucketful.

I get asked a lot how to keep garden blooms alive and looking good once cut so I thought I'd do a little post on it.

You just can't beat garden blooms, they are utterly gorgeous and often smell amazing! Plus they have no air miles! The reason that they do not last as long as supermarket flowers is because they are not treated with lots of chemicals, but I have lots of to tips to get them looking beautiful for longer!

                    

Firstly some blooms are better for cutting than others, Sarah Raven does a good selection of flower seeds especially for cutting, they have long stems and good vase life, but there are other ways in which to keep blooms blooming!

                     

This first and most important thing before you've even snipped a flower- is to wash a bucket and the vessel you're going to use. Flowers hate bacteria, I mean really hate it! Bacteria will kill a flower within the day. I like to use a kitchen spray bleach and rinse with warm water. It doesn't matter if a little bleach is left behind as this will help kill any germs, my grandma actually used to put a tiny bit of bleach in with her blooms and they loved it! Also make sure you clean all equipment especially secateurs.

Fill your bucket and vessel with water and put to one side to get up to room temperature, flowers hate being dropped into freezing water as much as you or I would and cold water can send them into shock poor things.

       

Always try and cut your blooms first thing in the morning when their sugar and water content is at its highest. Have your bucket of water ready, never put them in a trug as they will die, once air has got to the stem airlocks then prevent the flower from drinking property and the heads flop. Trugs are for dead heading and photo shoots. Cut quite far down and pop straight into water, you can remove the leaves at this point but I like to do this job as quickly as possible so I remove them later. Stand them somewhere cool and dark for a good couple of hours.

When ready to arrange- remove all leaves that would be bellow the water line as leaves will rot causing bacteria to build up, snip the ends at an angle so the flower can draw up the water easily.

Now the trick to really make them last is to change the water and clean the vase every other day, it's logic really, we wouldn't drink dirty water from a dirty cup and nor should any bloom.

It may all sound like a bit of a faff, but really, I find the whole process incredibly therapeutic!

Plus having my own flowers around the house and smelling lovely fills me with joy, it's hard to be sad when you have such gorgeous blooms to look at.

Emma.