Making and wrapping bouquets from the garden!)

Hey guys, it's Brie here with Blossom and Branch Farm, and today I'm making some bouquets for our market. So I thought I would kind of show you how I set up my assembly line for assembling bouquets and how I wrap them. We just use sheets of recycled craft paper to wrap our bouquets and it's a really great way to do it. So if you want to cut your own flowers out of your garden and give them as a gift, using craft paper is a really great way to wrap them up. So I'm going to show you how we do that. But first I'll show you how we set up our assembly line. So usually for market, I'm making a bunch of bouquets at one time. So I start by putting out all of my ingredients. So I start with usually my filler. So here I have some Orlea. Here I have the last of our tulips that we grew. These have been stored in our cooler on the bulb in water for about four to five weeks. So they can store a really long time. We have some of our beautiful biennial Fox glove. This adds a really kind of romantic element, I think, to market bouquets. The last of our peonies here as well. So these are all the peonies that have been in our cooler as well. And I usually like to include two different stages of peonies. So these things are a little bit tighter. These ones are more open. And that way the customer can enjoy the longevity of the bouquet a little bit more. Here we have a mix of snap dragons. This is a mix of here we have Potomac lavender, which has a little bit more purple in it. We have bridal pink, which is one of my new favorites. It kind of turns this light pink as it ages. And then we also have Potomac apple blossom. And I really like the Potomac because they have these nice strong stems. We grow some other varieties, but the stems aren't quite as strong as these ones. So for market, I like those strong ones. We have our gorgeous stock. And I love stock as an addition to bouquets because of the scent, but also because the base life is really long. This is the iron mix from Johnny's and it comes in this kind of mix of different pastel colors. And then we have some garden roses. So we're going to go ahead and assemble all of these things. What I do is I just work from that side to this side. I wrap it and then I cut it here and we just have our giant chopper. We put our stems in and we do a nice chop. It'll take off a finger. So be careful. So I'm going to start at this end and I'm just going to build as I go. So I just have already counted. So I know exactly how many of each stem are going to go into each bouquet. And as I'm building, I do kind of do a little bit of a cross. Hatch here. And that way it just helps spread out the flowers a little bit. So it makes for a nicer presentation for market bouquets to do it this way. So you can see every time I'm adding a stem, I'm kind of going in here at an angle and there we have our bouquets. So I'm just going to give it a chop. So here we have our rectangular piece of paper. And what I do is I actually fold it up because when it's this long, it's actually a little bit too long for our needs. So I usually fold this paper in half and then that also gives it a little bit of extra bulk. So it's just a little bit sturdier. Let me wrap my bouquet. I just use a rubber band and then I lay it down so that the band basically lines up with the bottom of the paper. And I'm going to go ahead and wrap this up and over. So I keep this tight here, pull this up. I do one staple here cause that helps keep it tight. Otherwise sometimes it can slip around and then I fold over here and I do one more staple up top. So here's the finished bouquet. I do like to have the focal flowers like the peonies and the roses sitting up high in the bouquet so that when someone glances at it, they're able to quickly see those valuable flowers. And I do have most of the flowers sitting up at about the same level so that they're not hidden by the wrap. All right guys, well it was so busy today getting everything done for market, but I really wanted to get this video done for you. And if you liked it, please please give us a like and a subscribe. It helped us out so much here at the farm and I hope you're inspired to maybe wrap up a bouquet for a friend or a neighbor. It can really brighten someone's day.