How To Keep Fresh Cut Flowers Alive Longer

Susie was going through some of our Grandma’s card boxes for inspiration and found this little gem.  I knew that I had to share it with you.  These are her tips for how to keep fresh cut flowers alive longer.

Our Grandma was a wealth of knowledge about a lot of things.  She kept boxes full of note cards.  From cooking, cleaning, gardening, canning, sewing.  You name it, she had a card for it.  Like her Spaghetti Seasoning Mix.

I love that her tips are simple to do.  So simple that even me, with my brown thumb, can try them.  Plus, Little Miss loved helping with everything.  From picking out the flowers, at the store, to arranging the flowers into the vases.  She even made this cute little bouquet.  She later put it in her room, “to make her room smell pretty”.

Grandma’s Tips To Keep Fresh Cut Flowers Alive Longer

Put a penny in a vase of tulips to keep their shape.  One of my favorite flowers are tulips. I started with a bent bag of tulips…apparently they had shoved too many bouquets into one pot at the store.  I put a penny in the bottom of the vase and the next day, they were all pointing as far upward as their bent stems would allow.

Smash chrysanthemum stems and add a little sugar to their water.  Since it’s not chrysanthemum season, I wasn’t able to test this one…keep an eye out for a followup post.

Split stems for longer life.  I tested this theory by cutting all the stems in my tulip bouquet, except for 2.

Two days later, and we were already seeing a difference in one of the uncut stems.

No leaves in the water.  The decay will poison the water.  This explains a lot of my past bouquets of flowers.  They never seem to last, and they always had the most disgusting water…I never paid attention to the leaves.  Lesson learned.

Cleansing powder in vase lengthens the life of cut flowers.  I had to do a bit of research on this one.  aka…ask mom what the heck cleansing powder is…According to mom, it’s Comet.  I don’t have Comet…So I used mom’s suggestion; 1/8 tsp bleach and 1 tsp sugar.  The bleach helps to fight off bacteria while the sugar feeds your flowers.

I’m really not sure what the last tip about a strawberry basket and flower “frog” means…so I’m going to let you make your own conclusions.  If you have any ideas, leave them in the comments!

My favorite part of writing this post is getting try all the tricks.  Which means that my house is full of fresh flowers.  Which makes me think of our Grandma.  It’s amazing how much happier a house with fresh flowers feels.  Makes me think that I should keep some all year long.  And with these tips, they will last for a nice long while.