Avoid Bringing Bugs and Dirt Inside on Your Cut Flowers with These 4 Quick Steps

We love to bring fresh-cut flowers in from our gardens, but unwanted hitchhikers like ants, aphids, and spiders also can come along for the ride. Insects are part of a garden’s ecosystem, and most of them are beneficial; only a tiny fraction are serious pests. However, that doesn’t mean you need to share your living room with bugs. And the insects would probably rather stay outside too, where they can perform important tasks such as pollination, preying on garden pests, and more.

You’re probably already in the habit of cleaning your homegrown produce, but here’s why you should also clean off your cut flowers, plus a step-by-step guide on how to do it effectively.

Why to Clean Cut Flowers

Besides leaving insects outside where they belong, cleaning off cut flowers before taking them inside helps reduce the amount of dirt and mess you’ll have to deal with later. Some common examples of what you may find on your flowers include:

• Native bees commonly take a snooze in the evening, curling up inside a dahlia petal, a sunflower, or on top of a zinnia. 
• Tiny caterpillars on the foliage are often hard to see.
• Aphids and spider mites brought in on cut flowers can find their way to your houseplants.
• If you’ve ever had a grasshopper in the house, you know that they’re just as hard to catch indoors as outside.
• Loose pollen and dust cause a mess under your vase. While it’s difficult to completely avoid, the less you bring in, the less there is to fall.
• Soil splashed onto lower foliage and stems makes your vase water muddy, which inhibits water uptake by the flowers and shortens their life. It gets your vase dirty, too.

How to Clean Fresh-Cut Flowers

For less mess, follow these steps to remove any dirt and bugs from your cut flowers before you bring them indoors:

1. Remove Lower Leaves

Right when you cut the flowers, strip off the foliage on the bottom half to two-thirds of the stem. This is an easy way to get rid of any hitchhikers or soil clinging to those leaves, plus it helps keep leaves out of your vase where they’ll quickly rot.

2. Shake It Off

Hold the flower upside down with the cut stem pointing up, and gently shake or swish it to encourage flying insects to leave. Be careful not to break the stems on flowers like cosmos or coneflowers because a bent stem won’t provide water to the bloom.

3. Submerge Stems

Set your cut flower stems immediately in a bucket of cool water. This helps prevent wilting, but also softens up and removes dirt and bugs on the stems. Dahlias, zinnias, and other cut-and-come-again flowers often come with soil, cobwebs, and detritus attached to them.

4. Dunk the Flowers

For more persistent insect issues, especially ants, which can be hard to dislodge, dip the flower head in cool, clean water for about 30 seconds until you see bugs floating up. Thinner-stemmed blooms may flop over with the weight of water on the petals, just like they do after a rainstorm, so make sure to support them until dry to prevent bent stems.