Supermarket blooms are a fantastic way to brighten up any room. You can get all sorts of lovely floral arrangements for a bargain price, proving that you don’t need to spend a fortune for something to make you smile.
But, sometimes, when you get your flowers home, it can feel like they only last a day or so before they’re drooping, and looking a little worse for wear.
Thankfully, TikToker Ashley Metcalf shared some tips to make your “grocery store flowers last up to two weeks”.
She said that “every two weeks,” she likes to “buy fresh flowers” as she loves to put them on her kitchen counter. She’s had to learn how to make them last a good amount of time, so she wanted to share her wisdom with others.
“If you take good care of the water and put them in your vase properly, they’ll last two weeks,” Ashley claimed – but she did share she wasn’t a florist, but has a florist pal who she asked to comment on the video if she’d made an error with the flower prep.
She explained that she got some “fresh cold tap water” in a vase and then popped the flower food into the vase.
She said whenever you see the water is either “cloudy” or “dirty,” you should change the water and put flower food in. If your flowers didn’t come with an additional pack of food, she shared that you can make it at home.
To make at-home flower food, use these three ingredients:
She then advised that you should “cut straight across on each stem”. Then she said it’s important to ensure that there are not “any leaves in the water,” so you should “trim all the leaves until it’s just stems going in the water”.
She then put the plant food in and stirred it around so that it would dissolve properly, rather than just plonking it in and hoping for the best.
Ashley explained that once all the leaves have been cut off, you can place the flowers in the vase and rearrange them if you want to, and they “should be good for two weeks” if you follow this method.
Someone in the comments shared their advice for making the blooms last even longer, penning: “I use a bit of the packet each time I change the water and trim just ever so slightly at the bottoms once I change the water and they last nearly 3 weeks for me”.
Another added: “Yesss! Cleaning the stems is key, and adding bleach!! And obviously, a clean vase! Nailed it!” And a TikToker claimed: “I think angles give more surface area, so they can drink more”.
