The Do's and Don'ts for Home Remedies for Lengthening the Life of Your Wedding Flowers

As soon as flowers are cut from their mother plants, they start to age or die. In order to enjoy them for as long as possible, you should take measures to lengthen life and ensure quality. There are a couple home remedies that you can use for do it yourself wedding flowers, and there are other techniques some people try that you should avoid.

The Home Remedy Do's

Lemon-lime Pop - This type of pop can lengthen the life of your flowers. It does not matter what brand name you use, but don't use the diet variety; it won't work. Lemon-lime pop has citric acid and carbonation in it. Those both act as a bactericide. Because the citric acid and carbonation kills the bacteria, the flowers feed off the sugar in the pop. As the carbonation wears off, however, it no longer kills the bacteria, allowing it to start growing at a rapid rate because of the sugar. You will need to change the water and add a fresh batch of lemon-lime pop every day. You can use the ratio of one part pop to two parts of water.
Medicinal Mouthwash - This is for killing germs and bad breath. It also kills bacteria, but is much stronger than lemon-lime soda pop. Add only 2 tablespoons to one gallon of water.

The Home Remedy Don'ts

Do not use sugar. This will cause a very rapid growth of bacteria which will make the water murky within hours. Instead of feeding the flowers, it feeds the bacteria which will then clog the stem, shortening the life of your flowers.
Do not use aspirin. Some brands have additives in them which shorten the life of your flowers. Aspirin has salicyclic acid in it. This helps lower the ph of the water, causing your flowers to hydrate quicker, but the benefits are minimal and short term at best.
Do not use pennies. Formerly the content of copper in pennies was much higher than it is today. When genuine copper pennies are added to water, the copper oxidizes slightly, creating cupric oxide. This is a very mild bactericide. Today our pennies have so little copper in them that this method is completely ineffective.

Your best bet for lengthening the life of your do it yourself wedding flowers is commercial floral preservative. Only use lemon-lime pop or medicinal mouthwash if proper preservative is not available.

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