Easy homemade flower food recipes
When displaying cut flowers, it's important to make sure that they have everything they need to keep them fresh. Apart from trimming the stems and providing your blooms with clean water, you can also provide them with nutrients. You don't necessarily need to buy flower food. You can try these easy tricks and recipes.
Three main ingredients:
When making flower food, you should include three main elements. These are: sugar, citric acid and bleach. The sugar provides your blooms with nutrition. Citric acid lowers the pH level of your vase water. As for the bleach, this helps prevent, or at least slow, the growth of bacteria in the vase water.
Easy recipe:
Now that you know what you need to make flower food and the important role each ingredient has to play, it's time to get mixing! Here are three easy options you can use depending on what you have on hand.
- Mix one part of lemon lime soda with 3 parts of water.
- Mix one quart of water with two tablespoons of lemon juice and a tablespoon of sugar. Make sure that you mix all of the ingredients until the sugar dissolves.
- Mix one quart of water with two tablespoons of sugar and two tablespoons of white vinegar. To dissolve the sugar quickly, start by mixing it with the vinegar and then add to the water.
Remember to always use the measurements listed above. If you use smaller amounts, your flower food will not be as effective. If you add too much of one or more of the ingredients, the mixture will be too strong and you could end up doing more harm than good. Whenever you top up your vase water, you should use the same mixture. This time, you can make a half mixture or just enough to top up the vase water. Remember to maintain the same ratios of each ingredient.
