How to Make Your Fresh Flowers Last Longer: Science-Backed Tips

Between work, family, and enjoying everything Chicago has to offer, keeping your space fresh and vibrant can feel like a challenge. Fresh flowers are a simple way to brighten any room, but they often wilt before you’ve had a chance to truly enjoy them. What if you could make that beautiful bouquet last weeks instead of days?

Why Do Cut Flowers Wilt So Quickly?

Fresh flowers wilt because they’ve been cut off from their main water source. The moment a stem is snipped, the clock starts ticking. To keep them hydrated and perky, you need to get them into water as soon as possible. This is the first and most crucial step in cleaning services in Chicago—wait, just kidding! It’s the first step in flower care. But if you’d rather leave the tidying to the pros, you can always schedule a cleaning with a trusted Chicago cleaning company like Jikas.

5 Pro Tips to Extend the Life of Your Bouquet

1. Give Stems a Fresh Cut

As soon as you bring flowers home, trim about an inch off the bottom of each stem at a 45-degree angle. Use clean, sharp scissors. This opens up the stem’s “drinking tubes” and prevents bacteria from clogging them. Re-trim the stems every 2–3 days when you change the water.

2. Choose & Clean Your Vase Carefully

Pick a vase that’s the right size for your bouquet and make sure it’s sparkling clean. Any leftover grime or bacteria will shorten your flowers’ lifespan. A quick wash with hot, soapy water does the trick. If you’d like that same level of clean for your whole home, our professional home cleaning team is just a click away.

3. Keep the Water Clean & Nourishing

Change the water every 2–3 days—don’t just top it off. This keeps it fresh and free of bacteria. Always use the flower food packet that comes with your bouquet. It contains sugar for energy, citric acid to help water flow, and a bit of bleach to fight bacteria. If you run out, you can buy more online or make your own with 2 tsp lemon juice, 1 tsp sugar, and a few drops of bleach per quart of water.

4. Remove Leaves Below the Waterline

Strip any leaves or foliage that would sit underwater. Submerged leaves rot quickly, spreading bacteria and clouding the water. This simple step keeps the environment clean and helps your flowers thrive.

5. Find the Perfect Spot for Your Bouquet

Keep flowers out of direct sunlight and away from heat sources like appliances or hot windows. Also, avoid placing them near fruit bowls—bananas and apples release ethylene gas, which speeds up the aging process in flowers.

Daily Maintenance for Longer-Lasting Flowers

Take a quick look at your bouquet each day. If you spot a drooping or decaying flower, remove it immediately. Just like one bad strawberry can spoil the bunch, one rotting flower can spread decay to the others. Giving your blooms a little daily attention ensures the rest stay beautiful longer.

If keeping up with daily tidying feels like too much, remember that you can always book an appointment for fast cleaning services to clean your apartment so you can focus on the things you love.

If you’ve brought a bouquet of fresh flowers home, been really excited about them, and a couple of days later they are looking sad and pathetic and wilted, that is something that will happen if you don’t know how to take care of your flowers properly. However, if you do, you can stretch the life of your flowers and they can look beautiful for a pretty decent amount of time. So, in this video, I’m going to give you some sciencebacked ways that you can care for your cut flowers so they last a really long time. Give this video a thumbs up if you love fresh flowers. And just a quick reminder, if you haven’t done so already, to subscribe to the Clean My Space channel, and I just wanted to let you know that this video is brought to you by our sister company, Makers Clean, where we sell our premium microfiber cleaning tools and so much more. Now, if you’re someone who loves to have cut flowers and greens at home, that is me. I love the way flowers look at home, but I also don’t want to go and like blow a ton of money on flowers all the time. So, what I’ve started to do is buy the flowers that last a really long time. I’ve learned how to take good care of them so that I don’t have to replenish them and it’s less expensive. So, I’ve put together a printable for you of flowers and greens that last a really long time. So when you go to a florist or a grocery store, you know what to ask for or you know what to look for. I also include on there some that die pretty quickly. Even though they look gorgeous, trust me, you don’t want to spend your money on them. Unless you do, in which case, okay, but don’t say I didn’t warn you. You can get your hands on this printable by clicking the link down below. Let’s quickly understand why fresh cut flowers wilt in the first place, and that’s because they are cut off from their main water supply. So, as soon as you cut a fresh flower, you want to get it into water as quickly as possible. Now, generally speaking, if you’re not cutting flowers from your own backyard, your florist is going to handle this for you. But when you get the flowers from the florist and bring them home, you want to make sure that they get in water as quickly as possible so that they can start sucking water back up through their stem and to hydrate themselves. But you knew that already. The thing that you might not know is that the stem has to be clean and clear for the flower to drink effectively. So, the first thing I’ve been told by florists is as soon as you get home to cut the flower about an inch from the bottom on a 45° angle with a clean pair of scissors. This is going to make sure that there’s no bacteria that’s going to gum up the bottom of the flower and so that it has a nice clean spot to start drinking from. However, the water can get dirty. We’ll talk about this in the video in some more detail. and some bacteria can get in there as well, which is why it’s important to change your water and to cut the stem by about an inch every 2 to 3 days. Now, half the fun of bringing flowers home is picking a beautiful vase or vase. I don’t know, I kind of say it both ways. But first, you want to make sure that it is clean. The vessel that you choose is clean and dirtree. If it has bacteria or mold in it, that is going to affect the lifespan of the flowers that you’re putting in. You don’t need anything more than hot soapy water. So, give that a good scrub. And then you can fill the vase or vase with room temperature water. And we’ll get to flower food in a moment. Don’t worry. You also want to make sure that you’re changing your water, like I said, every 2 to 3 days, not just topping it off, because changing that water is going to give the flowers fresh water to drink from. It’s going to get rid of any of that gummed up stuff that can start to build up. So, you know, to trim the stems of the flowers when you bring them home, but then when you’re changing and refreshing the water, you’re also going to trim the stems by about an inch, and you’re going to do it on a 45° angle. This is going to give the flower the ability to suck up what it needs effectively. Now, a good tip is to do this while the stem of the flower is underwater. So, you might want to have a bucket or a bowl, put the stem in water, do your 45° angle trim, and then place the flowers back into the vase. If you’ve seen a florist in action, you’ll know that one of the things they do is strip the bottom of the stem of the flower to remove any extra foliage before they put it into a vase. And this is because leaves sitting below the waterline can start to rot and gum up the water. This rot will speed up the decay of the flowers. So, you actually don’t want anything getting into that water. Now, what about that packet of flower food? Is that really important? Do you really need to put that into the water? The answer is yes, because it helps to clean the water and to nourish the flowers. So, if you really want to extend the life of your cut flowers, it’s a really good idea to use that. Now, you tend to get a packet when you buy a bouquet of flowers, but that’s about all. So, you can either buy more, you can get those online, or you can even make your own at home. Now, there’s three main components of this flower food. You’ve got sugar for energy, citric acid, which helps to lower the pH and help water flow, and then a bit of bleach, which helps to fight bacteria. So, if you want to make your own version of this instead of purchasing it, and in fact, I do recommend purchasing it. It’s not terribly expensive to have at home and you don’t have to worry about whipping it up all the time. But again, if you want a DIY, I will happily give you one. It’s 2 tsp of lemon juice, 1 teasp of sugar, and a few drops of bleach. You add this to a quart of water. Now, the reason I don’t recommend making this at home is because lemon juice can go rancid fairly quickly. So, you would have to use this on a pretty regular and frequent basis. Like, for example, if you were a restaurant, um, so that it wouldn’t go bad. You don’t just want to stick this under your cupboard and you, you know, use it up across the span of a year. Now, make sure that where you put your cup flowers maximizes their lifespan. If you put them in direct sunlight or in front of a really hot appliance or a hot window, they’re going to cook. they’re not going to last as long. So, you kind of want to put them in a cooler, drier spot if you want them to look good for a really long time. Another quick tip is to keep them away from a fruit bowl. Bananas and apples specifically give off what’s called ethylene gas, which ripens very quickly. So, if you have flowers nearby, that’s going to speed up the aging process of the flowers, and they’re going to go bye-bye a little bit quicker along with those brown bananas. And one other quick thing you can do is just quickly eyeball your bouquet every day. If you notice that there’s something drooping or one flower is looking a little bit off, don’t leave it there. Pull it out because if it’s rotting, it will spread that rot, kind of like a strawberry, to the other flowers. So just get rid of anything that’s not in its peak shape so that the other flowers have their best shot at living a long and healthy life at home. So, now you have some sciencebacked ways to care for your cut flowers, extend their life at home so they can look more beautiful for longer. And that brings me to this week’s comment question, which is, I recently announced that I’m divorced. So, I’m a single woman and I’ve been on maybe a date or two and I’ve gotten flowers sometimes and sometimes I haven’t. And I must say, I love getting flowers on a first date. But let me know in the comments down below. What do you think about flowers on a first date? Giving or receiving? Do you think it’s old-fashioned? Do you think it’s nice? Do you think flowers in this economy on a first date? Let me know your opinions in the comments down below. And a quick reminder, if you aren’t already, become a Dirty Dish subscriber. It’s a hilarious newsletter that we send out that talks about cleaning and caring for your home, and we make it fun and easy to read, and you you should just sign up for it. There’s a link for it down below. If you like what we do here at Clean My Space, consider becoming a member. Now, caring for cut flowers is one thing, but caring for plants is a whole different ballgame. But I have a video on that. I did it with my friend Daryl from House Plant Journal, and I’ve got a link to that video right over here. If you haven’t done so already, make sure that you subscribe to the Clean MySpace channel. Thanks so much for watching, and we’ll see you next time.