Cut Flower Care For Roses

I'm Julie Klingaman with Grohe Florist, and June is National Rose Month. So today I'm going to talk to you about the care of your roses. You've received roses and you want them to last as long as possible, so I'm going to give you some ideas of how to keep the flowers lasting. First of all, you want your water to be clean, so you're going to need to change the water about every other day. You either will need to have two people there, somebody to hold the arrangement while you change the water, or you're going to need two vases. I have two vases with me. I have some clean water, and I'm lucky because I have floral preservative to put in the water already.

At home, if you don't have floral preservative, just make sure you have nice clean water in a clean vase. The other alternative to floral preservative is Sprite or Sierra Mist. I've tried a few experiments and that one seemed to work the best from the old wives tale of what you put in your water to make your roses last. What you're going to need to do is take your arrangement out of the vase, and you want to strip down any of the leaves that are in there, 'cause that will help create bacteria growth, so you want to strip down any leaves.

If you're going to take some scissors, or if you have pruners from your garden, you want to trim about a half an inch off of each rose, and that's going to help them have a nice fresh cut, so that they can start drinking up the clean water. You don't want to trim too much 'cause you want to be able to keep doing this about every other day so you don't want the flowers to get too short. So, like I said, about a half an inch is enough. This is where sometimes having a second hand is helpful. You want to stick it back down into the vase, and you gotta get all the stems together and bring it down in. And now you have a nice, fresh arrangement again, with clean water.

I hope this helps you keep your roses lasting as long as possible. Have a great day.