And just in time for those first snowflakes to fall here in Eastern, Iowa. The weather today was a real reminder that we are in fact heading into winter and it's going to be some months before those glorious blooming flower fields again.
But not to worry. We saved many flowers that can still creatively be brought into your home or office. As we get into the swing of things, we thought we should give a little background on our everlasting dried flower wreaths and share some behind the scenes of our process.
The first part of the process comes a whole year before we even make any wreaths, with the process of picking out seeds and selecting the varieties we're going to grow for the year ahead. While we primarily select flowers that we know we'll use fresh, we also make sure to pick out some that we know we'll be able to use for wreath making.
Some of our favorite flowers for drying are statice, strawflowers, gomphrena, amaranth and celosia.
When we make our planting plan for the year, we make sure to grow a little extra so there's plenty to use for fresh cut bouquets and to take for the fall.
The next step is to actually do the growing! We try to cut flowers for drying periodically throughout the summer so that it doesn't have to happen in a rush during the fall, but that isn't always possible. This year we used pretty much everything in bloom in our weekly Flower CSA and didn't end up cutting flowers for drying until late September.
After cutting flowers for drying we hang them upside down in an area out of the sun and keep a fan on them for a couple of weeks.
We make the majority of wreaths (but not all) on handmade dogwood bases. Dogwood is a BEAUTIFUL woody perennial that thrives in our climate and is great to work with!
Next is time to design and attach the flowers to the base.
This is where the creativity and fun comes in!!!