EATING AN ELEPHANT

With wedding season in here in full force, it is easy to often times get overwhelmed with all the last minute demands on time. What happens is that when events get out of time control, they often get out of money control as well and the profitability is quickly diminished. Recipes are disregarded for the sake of getting the event finished. All the pre-planning and projected profit is down the tube due to improper execution.
When you step back and examine the true culprit of this chaos, most often the four letter word ‘time’ is the culprit. Let’s take a look at some tips and tricks that might help manage the events in a reasonable amount of time.
First, examine when your Florabundance flowers are scheduled to arrive. Most wedding flowers need a minimum of two days to hydrate properly and continue the maturation process. Proper hydration and cold chain cooling are the success for maintaining the high quality of the Florabundance product. With many events on Friday and Saturday, try backing up the arrival of your product for delivery on Tuesday. This will allow sufficient time for tighter flowers to open and you can keep more delicate and fragile flowers in the cooler.
Most designers want to do the personal flowers late in the week such as Friday. While this may be perceived as keeping the flowers fresh, the truth of the matter is you are designing with the same flowers that arrived on Tuesday or Wednesday. With hand-tied bouquets, these can be constructed on Wednesday or Thursday and allowed to continue to hydrate in vases of properly mixed preservative water. Do the finish work, i.e. adding the stem treatment and ribbons on the day of the event. Applying a topical anti-transparent to the bouquets will help slow down or retard the maturation process. Also, keeping the bouquets covered in a light weight plastic bag such as a dry cleaning bag will also retard the transpiration process (water loss).
Flowers that are wilt sensitive such as cut ivy can be easily processed for added shelf life. Soak the ivy in a bucket of water for a couple of hours to ensure complete hydration. Next, mix a solution of one half clear acrylic floor polish such as Future and one half water. Mix thoroughly and then swish the ivy around in the wax solution. What you are doing is applying a coating of acrylic wax to the ivy to seal in the water. The wax seals the ivy therefore keeping the water inside the leaves. There is no need to soak this ivy; just swish it around until all the leaves are covered. Take it out of the wax solution and spread it out to allow to dry. Remember, this is wax, so you will want to protect the surface that you are spreading the ivy on and also remember that if you allow the ivy to touch other pieces of ivy, it will stick together when dry. This treated ivy can be misted and stored in a sealed plastic bag for weeks in the cooler, so there is no need to wait to do this process until wedding week
For delicate flowers such as Gardenias and Stephanotis, try this process. Hydrate Stephanotis by floating it in water for a couple of hours. Gardenias can be hydrated by snipping a bit of the stem off and placing them on a tray of marbles or gems filled with water. After hydrating, wire and tape your flowers in your normal fashion. Once they are wired and taped, dip them into a bowl of Future floor polish to achieve the same results as the ivy – a sealer that will not harm the flowers, but retards the maturation process. Allow these to dry at room temperature and them into a plastic bag stored in the cooler.