Your Vases Stay Full All Summer When You Grow With These

Kitchen scissors crush a stem's water channels as they cut, and a flower that cannot drink is wilting before it reaches the house. Thin sharp floral blades slice clean, reach into a tangle of zinnias without taking neighbours, and make the angled cut that keeps the stem off the vase floor.

Cut in the cool of morning, straight into water - not into a fist in the sun.

One summer storm flattens an unsupported cutting bed, and flowers that grow along the ground curve - permanently. Florists' stems are straight because the plants grew up through horizontal netting stretched a foot above the soil. One layer, installed at planting, disappears under foliage by June.

Install over the empty bed; wrestling netting over grown plants breaks what it would save.

The little packets are sugar to feed the stems, acidifier to help them drink, and biocide to keep the water from turning to soup - and the difference is three or four extra days of vase life, which for a home-cut bouquet is nearly double. A bulk tub costs what a dozen packets do and lasts two seasons.

The penny-and-bleach folklore does part of the job; the real mix does all of it.

Every leaf under water is dissolving into bacteria that plug stems, which is why unstripped bouquets die by Wednesday. Pulling leaves by hand works until the twentieth stem and the first rose. The stripper pulls stems through spring-loaded jaws - leaves and thorns off in one motion, gloves optional.

Nothing below the waterline, ever - the one florist rule that does most of the work.

Flowers cut in the morning want a few hours up to their necks in deep cool water somewhere dark before arranging - conditioning - and a kitchen pot is too short to support the stems it soaks. Tall florist buckets hold stems upright; two or three cover the biggest picking morning.

Scrub the buckets like dishes - dirty buckets seed the bacteria that shorten every vase.