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Hello gardening friends welcome to Backyard Basics. At this time of the year there are
a lot of flowers in the garden. I love the cut zinnias and many other flowers to put
in to the house. And in the off-season also, we always have flowers at home. It's an important
part of the home. Have some fresh flowers in there, cut flowers, it's really nice to
have them. And it's really nice to grow your own, but the idea is to keep them fresh as
long as possible. You know the last thing you want is a bunch of flowers, twenty bucks
worth of flowers going downhill in three days. So there are ways of keeping them going, and
especially when you are cutting them out of your yard, you need to come up with a way
to keep them going. And so, this is how you do it. This is a homemade method of preserving
your flowers, ok? So what we're going to need is three cups of water, and we're going to
take that water and put it in to our flower base right here. Nice fresh water. If it's
a little bit warm, it's really ok, but of course water is an important part of this
whole deal, so three cups. Now you can change the ratio if you got a bigger container, and
you need more water. Just ratchet it up. The next thing is a little bit of food for the
plants, and generally a lemon-lime soda is the one that is most frequently suggested.
There is a bunch of nutrients in here, there is sugar to keep these things going. So it
keeps them nice and fresh so the next thing we do is go ahead and put that soda in there,
always lemon-line, and then in order to keep them from going bad, a little bit of bleach.
Maybe just in the range of a quarter teaspoon, it really doesn't take that much at all. I
wish there were other alternatives to the bleach and maybe hydrogen peroxide might work,
but I've never really done it with that one. So, these are the main three ingredients that
we put in there. The next thing that's really important is when you bring in your flowers,
whether you buy them or you grow them yourself, you need to get some fresh water going into
them. And when you get them, they have healed off right here. No moisture will go up into
it. As a matter of fact, it happens very quickly. So the ideal thing to do is either under running
water, or in a container with water like this one we'll go in there and we'll cut the stem
at about a forty-five degree angle. A nice little angle like that. As you can see there
is a nice angle there, ant this is important. Otherwise it's sitting on the bottom, and
no moisture is going into it. So forty-five degrees is very important. Now one of the
things that you do need to watch for is that the foliage isn't under the water where it
will decompose quickly and just make everything go downhill. So the best thing to do is anywhere
there might be foliage that goes under the water, we'll go ahead and remove it. It's
really important to do that. And so we keep doing the same thing. We get the next one
here. Cut it at a forty-five degree angle, and the main thing is when we have a cut like
that, that we do it in the water. I just wanted to show you that angle. So now we do it down
here. It's taking in fresh water, once again we remove any of these leaves that are right
here so they don't decompose in the water, and then they go down in here to make this
display. Here's another one already cut, so we're going to go ahead and make a fresh cut
on there. Once again, taking in the water very, very quickly, like I said you can do
it under running water. Here's a leaf that may go down into the water, so we're going
to remove it also, so it goes in there. We just do these things quickly. Otherwise it's
going to heal off, and not be able to absorb water. Once again, forty-five degree cut.
It's in the water. It's absorbing water very, very quickly, and then, here's a leaf right
here, it goes down into the container. This is a nice home-made remedy for keeping these
flowers fresh. One of the things you want to do is keep it in a cool place. They last
a lot longer. Some people will put them into their refrigerator. One of the things though,
whether it's going into the refrigerator, or sitting on a counter where there might
be apples and bananas, and other things of that nature. They will give off a gas. It's
called ethylene gas. This is what they use to ripen bananas. They're picked green, they're
sent into the country, and in order to ripen them quickly they give them ethylene gas,
same thing as done with pineapples. You spray them with ethylene gas and they go into the
bloom. Well that ethylene gas will accelerate these blooms right here, and they won't last
very long at all. So the main thing to remember is, don't put them near any fruits or vegetables
that might be sitting out. You will have them just not last long at all, and I think it's
really important when you have cut flowers, and you've gone through all of that time to
grow them, that you would come to keep them fresh as long as possible. Remember when you're
our buying flowers, to look for some of the locally grown ones. They haven't been shipped
over a couple of weeks, or many days. The important thing is, they're local grown, and
it's usually a family farmer. So here's a good way to keep your flowers fresh. I hope
you will enjoy flowers all summer long the way we do. For backyard basics, I'm John Dromgoole.
I'll see you next time.