How to process flowers so they last the week

Ask an owner what they watch on a trial shift and most of them will say the same thing. Not the bouquet. The bucket.

Processing is unglamorous, repetitive, and most of what a first year in this trade actually consists of. It is also the part that customers judge without knowing they are judging it, because a bouquet that dies on Wednesday is a bouquet they don’t buy again.

The intake routine

A box arrives. What happens next decides most of its life.

Get it unpacked quickly. Stems have been out of water in transit and the clock has been running the whole time. Strip the foliage that would sit below the waterline, because leaves in water are what turn a clean bucket cloudy in a day.

Cut on an angle with something sharp. The angle is to stop the stem sitting flat on the bottom of the bucket rather than for any romantic reason about surface area. Sharp matters more: a blunt blade crushes the vessels you’re trying to open, and scissors do this to soft stems constantly.

Then into clean water with flower food, and into the cooler if you have one.

That last stage is the part people mean when they say conditioning, or hardening: letting the stems drink properly before anyone builds with them. Several hours is normal and overnight is better. Processing is the whole routine. Conditioning is the drink at the end of it, and a box that has been cut and stripped but not given that time will wilt in the customer’s hand.

Clean is the whole thing

Buckets are the part people skip and the part that costs them.

A bucket that looks clean and smells slightly sweet is a bucket full of bacteria, and bacteria block the stem ends within hours. Wash them properly, with detergent, between every use. Shops that do this get days more out of the same stock than shops that rinse and refill.

The same applies to your tools and your work surface. None of this is tidiness for its own sake, and the shops that treat it that way pay for it in stock they throw out. It is the cheapest vase life you will ever buy.

The stems that break the rules

General practice gets you most of the way. These are the exceptions.

Woody stems like lilac and hydrangea need the surface area, so split or crush the base rather than just cutting it. Hydrangea also drinks through its head, which is why a wilted one sometimes revives after a full dunk.

Milky stems such as euphorbia and poppy leak a sap that blocks other stems and irritates skin. Sear the cut end, or dip it briefly in boiling water. Then stand them in a bucket of their own.

Hollow stems like amaryllis and delphinium can be filled with water and plugged, which stops them collapsing under their own height.

Bulb flowers generally want cold water and their own bucket. Daffodils in particular release a sap that shortens the life of anything sharing their water for the first several hours.

Temperature does more than anything you do by hand

A cooler at the right temperature will outperform every trick in this article.

Most cut flowers hold best a little above freezing. The exceptions are the tropicals, which are damaged by cold rather than preserved by it, so anthurium and orchid want ordinary room temperature and will spoil in a cooler set for roses.

If you’re working somewhere without a cooler, the next best thing is out of the sun, out of a draft, and away from ripening fruit. Fruit releases ethylene, which ages flowers, and a bowl of apples near the workroom has ended more carnations than anyone admits.

That principle scales all the way up the supply chain, where it becomes the cold chain that decides what a wholesaler can sell at all. There is more on it in the jobs that get flowers where they are going.