Drying Flowers

Drying flowers is a wonderful way to preserve your summer blooms. It is a fairly simple process that have stunning results.

We like to use two methods depending on what flowers we are drying: hang drying and silica gel drying.

Hang drying is a great for thinner, easier to dry flowers like yarrow, statice, strawflower, gomphrena, celosia, and baby's breath. This method takes a bit longer to dry but is an easier process to do.

Silica Gel Drying is a wonderful way to preserve flowers for a very long time (decades even). We exclusively dry zinnias, unless drying for seeds or potpourri, and dahlias this way as they are thicker and need some extra help.

How to Hang Dry Flowers

The hang drying method is super simple.

All you need to do is:

1. Harvest the flowers you would like to dry. Harvesting in the morning or evening is best

2. Remove all the leaves and bundle your flowers together. We like to stick with 5-10 stems per bundle, depending on how thick the flowers are. This is up to your judgement/comfort, you just want to avoid the flowers squishing too much together.

   
   

   A Note on bundling them: if you are drying flowers with large heads, place them at different lengths in your bundle. This will help them avoid rubbing and pressing together.

3. Hang upside down to dry in a dry place. Avoid super sunny spaces as the sun will bleach out the color.

4. The flowers will be completely dry in two weeks!

How to Silica Dry Flowers

Silica Gel Drying:

Silica Gel for Drying Flowers is a great way to dry flowers that don't dry well when hung upside down. Zinnias are a great example of this, as their blooms curl and turn brown when hung upside down.

The process is also fairly simple:

1. Harvest flowers and remove leaves.

2. Gather an air tight container

3. Pour a layer of the silica gel into your air right container- about 1.5 inch thick

4. Place your flowers on top of the gel, face up (or on their side if using a long flower like delphinium) making sure no petals are touching.

Note: if drying with them with the stems, you can place them face down. Just be extremely careful when removing so you don't damage the petals.

5. Add another layer of the silica gel until the flower petals are completely covered and cover with lid.

6. Wait until the flowers are completely dry before removing from silica completely. this can take anywhere from 36 hours- a week

This method is great for larger, harder to dry flowers like zinnias, dahlias, daisies, peonies, and roses. You can use silica gel on most flowers though as this method has proven to last a very long time.

Our favorite flowers to dry:

Celosia

Zinnias- silica gel drying only

Marigolds

Gomphrena

Strawflower

Yarrow

Lavender

Delphinium

Statice

Dahlias- Silica gel drying only

Globe Thistle

Baby's Breath

Coneflower

Limelight Hydrangea

Here's to beautiful blooms all year!