As fresh as a daisy - 5 tips to extend Vase Life

1 Buy fresh

There is no doubt that fruit and vegetables harvested from your garden, or bought from your local farmers markets, are infinitely fresher than those shipped in from abroad. Fresh homegrown produce therefore has the longest ‘use by’ date. Not surprisingly, the same is true for flowers. For each of us, the freshest bunch is the one that travels least - straight from our garden and into the vase. Their poor cousins, the imported flowers, will have been tightly packed into cardboard boxes, travelled thousands of miles in the hold of an aeroplane, languished for hours in a warehouse and sweated it out on the shelves of a (warm) supermarket. They are simply not the freshest faces in town.

2 Clean Container

Your container - vase, jar or jug must be super-clean. A quick scrub with baking soda is probably the most environmentally friendly solution. (We welcome advice on this). If you are not prepared to drink out of the container yourself then don’t expect your flowers to drink from it and stay healthy.

3 Clean water

Here at BordersEcoFlowers, we intentionally grow our flowers without chemicals, no chemical fertilisers, pesticides or weed killers. To us therefore, it is an anathema to add a cocktail of chemicals to the water in the vase. Those little sachets of chemicals (called flower food – yuk) were basically invented for busy American housewives, who couldn’t find the time (surely no less than a minute or so) to change the water in a vase. A quick recce of the internet throws up some intriguing recipes for homemade preservatives (e.g. sugar, bleach, lemon juice, white vinegar, 7 Up and even copper pennies! Should you fancy yourself as a scientist, you could do some experiments to see which was the best. We follow two simple rules. Make sure that there are no leaves below the water line (or they just go rotten) and change the water each day. H20 is King!

4 Clean air

Your grandmother may have told you never to display a vase of flowers next to the fruit bowl, and you probably dismissed here as an old wife telling an Old wives’ tale. In fact, your dear granny was correct. Her words of wisdom should be heeded. When fruit ripens, it gives off a gas called ethylene. This gas is colourless and odourless, so us humans cannot detect it. Fortunately, ethylene is not harmful to humans but plants, on the other hand, are rather more sensitive. Basically, ethylene causes premature ageing. What that means for our vase of flowers is that the gas stimulates petal drop and the formation of seeds and a seed pods. Having enjoyed our floral display for just a few days we complain that our flowers are ‘over‘ and we fling them in the bin (hopefully the one destined for the compost). In short, keep your flowers away from ripening fruit.

5 Keep cool

Overheating causes us humans to dehydrate and the same applies to cut flowers. Back to the science again. A higher temperature means that more water evaporates (it is called transpiration) from the leaves. The plants roots cannot take up water fast enough to replace that which is lost. The result is that the poor plant wilts. So don’t put your vase of blooms by a radiator or on a sunny windowsill. Move them to a cool place at night.