Less Flowers, More Impact: Bouquet Making Tips

Hey again, it's Christina from Sunshine and Flora. Well, it's time to put together my weekly bouquets again, so I thought I would set the camera up, bring you along, show you what I'm harvesting this week. Now this is a time of the season where I'm kind of in between my blooms. My spring blooms from the hoop house are really tapering off. They're rejuvenating for the next flush. All of the flowers out in the garden that I can see out my windows are just starting to put on buds. Zinnias haven't started, celosia hasn't started, but some of the earlier planted things in the perennials have. So it's that time of the garden where I'm a little bit in between spring and summer and the blooms are kind of minimal. So I'm going to show you today in this video what I can put together for minimal blooms, but big impact bouquets. Okay, so I just harvested all these flowers, like I said, about 10 minutes ago. They're fresh, they're ready to be put into bouquets. So here's what I'm working with this week. And at the end of this video, I'm going to show you what I'm harvesting and what my plans are for my bouquets next week for 4th of July. They're going to be good. All right, so the first thing I've harvested is bupleurum. My bupleurum, all of my early plantings and my ones that self-seeded themselves are really at the end of their lives. The ones that are out at their garden are pretty much done for, but I was able to find enough stems that I'll be able to use for a little bit of filler for this week's bouquets. So the filler in this week's bouquet is bupleurum. And then we might as well just go to the flower that you're probably seeing on the camera the most, rudbeckia. These are amazing. These are the biggest blooms. This is the, I'm going to have to put the name on the screen. It's not Goldilocks. I cannot remember it. I actually didn't plant these this year. These are plants that came back from last year and they are really pretty. So these are obviously going to be the main focal flower in this week's bouquet. And do I really need anything else? They're huge. Also I'm just starting to get rudbeckia from this year's planting. These are very small because this plant just got harvested out last week, but it's starting to rejuvenate. These are the chimchimney. Also I never really considered this a cut flower, but they work great and they spread on their own and they come back every year strong, echinacea. This is just the standard pink echinacea. I've got some white and red that are starting out there that are not ready to harvest yet. But when I don't have a lot of flowers, I like to harvest these because they look beautiful in bouquets. I also harvested as an accent flower, some feverfew and I absolutely love feverfew. It is one of my favorites. This is probably the year of the least feverfew that I will ever have. Next year I plan to fall plant it and then I will have all the feverfew I need. But usually perennial, feverfew will perennialize, but some of my patches didn't come back and I think that's because we got so cold over the winter and we didn't have snow for insulation. So the feverfew that I have for my early spring harvest, I'm on the tail end of, but I have enough for accent flowers in my bouquets. And what I have the most of right now, which I absolutely love. You can use it fresh, you can dry it. It lasts forever in bouquets is yarrow and I have a bunch of colors. So I'm going to plan on using one or two rubeccia and an echinacea for my focal flowers. I'll fill in with some yarrow for added color and then I will put one to two stems each of bupleurum and feverfew in around the edge and it's going to be a beautiful bouquet. So I'm going to get some paper cut. Let's put a few together. OK, so it's nine fifty five. The store opens at ten. Let's see if I can get three bouquets put together in five minutes. I think I can do it. So the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to grab one of these huge rubeccia and one of these echinacea because I know for sure I want these to go in my bouquet. Then I'm going to grab a stem of that bupleurum for filler because I like to have one stem of filler kind of right in the middle. And I'm going to go ahead and put one of these chim chiminey in here. I actually I have two of those. I'm going to put one of those in each bouquet and I have one random. Oh my gosh, if I can get it out of here, that's what happens when I jam so much in a harvest bucket. I have one. Well, and he's got friends. I've got one random Sahara, so I'm going to use those two. All right. So I've got my rubeccia, echinacea and a bupleurum. Then I'm going to come in with three nice yarrow and I'm going to try to use different colors, maybe four because some of them are a little bit smaller. Oh, yeah, that's looking good. Then I'm going to put another rubeccia on this side. I'm going to grab a feverfew and I'm going to grab another bupleurum. That was another feverfew. Let's grab another bupleurum. There we go. And it's not quite big enough yet. So let's add one more nice big stem of yarrow. I've got to shred a little more off the bottom here, bring the feverfew to the top. There we go. Pretty simple. And sometimes when you have limited flowers, it kind of gives you a more simple color palette, which is very pleasing to the eye, I feel. All right. I think that's going to be beautiful. All right. So I'm going to start with a bupleurum in the center. Oh, that's a nice big one. I love bupleurum. It also lasts really long in the vase and it sells seeds for me every year, which is great because then I know early in the spring, it's going to be a reliable option that comes back on its own. All right. I'm going to use the Sahara and two Echinacea in here because I'm only going to use one of the Rubeckia because I have two left that are a little smaller and I want to make sure that I use those two together and then we'll put the feverfew in. One, two. OK. One of these stems wilted, so I'm not going to use him right away and then I'm just going to fill in around with all the yarrow I'm going to use. Yarrow's going to be like my saving grace this week. You know what? I love it. It's there's so many different colors. It's that cottage garden look. It just screams summer to me. Also when you use less ingredients and you're just using more stems of less ingredients, it kind of simplifies the way you put the bouquets together and streamlines it. So if you're putting together a bunch of bouquets for a farmer's market, make them all the same. Make a recipe and that will help you put a lot of bouquets together in a really short amount of time. All right. Number two. One more. It's actually been the five minutes, but I've been talking. I'm going to put one more bouquet together and then I'm going to open the storefront. So we've got bupleurum. I'm going to use this. I've got an Echinacea. I'm going to use these two chimneys. We're going to use a big yellow on the side and a big yarrow on the side for yellow. Then feverfew. Like I said, this year might be a low year of feverfew for me, which is a little bit disappointing. I have a friend that has a flower farm that is about a half hour away from me and she just did the most abundant, beautiful feverfew harvest. And it was all from her hoop house that she fall planted. And a lot of times I will have feverfew growing in my hoop house that comes up very early in the spring. It perennializes and so it's almost like I have fall planted it. This year I did not have that, which is one of the reasons that I am a little low. So I think next year what I'm going to do in the fall is either start them from seed or I will just make sure to order some fall plugs from Farmer Bailey and plant a nice big section of feverfew in the hoop house for fall. Get a nice new established patch going. And then I know this bouquet feels a little small compared to the others as I'm talking. And then I know that I'm going to be getting a new patch of feverfew established. All right, this is bouquet number three. I think I'm about 10 minutes or two minutes past what I wanted my deadline to be. That's all right. All right. It's beautiful. Let me show you how all three came together. OK, here they are. Just a few ingredients, but lots of impact and color. I love the pink and yellow and white for summer. It's just nice and cheery. And as I promised, I'm going to give you a sneak peek of one of the ingredients that I'm going to be using in next week's 4th of July bouquets. All right. Here it is. Holy cow. Do these look like blue fireworks or what? So this is the blue Orangium. It's at a perfect stage to harvest. It is a little pokey, so you have to be careful when you harvest it. And it has a smell to it. So you want to make sure that you probably only want to use one stem per bouquet. But if you want blue flowers for an occasion, this is definitely blue. So these are going to go in the cooler and these are going to be for next week's 4th of July bouquets. Now in addition to that blue Orangium, I'm going to be using red yarrow, which I have some that's just about ready in the garden. And then as far as white, I'm going to have some white Echinacea. I've got some Fama white pincushion flowers. I also have Fama blue pincushion flowers. So if I use some of that with one stem of that Orangium with the yarrow and then the white, I also should have white yarrow. That'll be a red, white and blue perfect bouquet. And I will definitely make sure to do a video on that. So I probably need to hop back out into the garden, harvest a few more stems of Rubbeckia and Echinacea because I do have two more bouquets to make for sure today for pickup. So I'm going to do that. I'm going to cut this video off here. Thank you so much again for watching and stay tuned for another full video this weekend. I'm going to be posting my June garden tour, so that's one that you're going to want to see. You can see the whole entire garden and how it is doing. So thanks again for watching. Please subscribe to the channel and we'll see you in the next video.