before we know it winter is going to be here
and it is going to be sad and miserable but
i have good news you can bring your summer flowers
into winter with you stay tuned and i will show you how
hello friends welcome to gardening with creekside i am jenny and today i am
going to share with you how easy it is to take some of your summer
garden into the winter time with you
because i know if you're like me it comes to be
late december january especially because after the christmas holidays and you
take down all your christmas decorations and your house just seems empty
and you're just wishing and dreaming of warm summer days again
we can bring our summer garden into our homes with us
even in those times it is really really easy
there are some flowers that lend themselves very easily
to being dried among those are three that we're going to focus on today
hydrangeas gomphrena and lavender super easy to do so
beside of me i have an example of some limelights that we have already
dried it's a very simple process all you have to do is simply cut the
hydrangea flour stick it in a glass of with some water
about one to two inches of water and then just leave them alone as the
plants suck up the water and the water evaporates
over about a week or two one to two weeks worth of time then the hydrangeas
will naturally dry themselves now if you're like me i did not know
this little trick a couple years ago so i cut these gorgeous hydrangeas and
the way that i was always taught to dry flowers was to tie a string around them
and hang them upside down well i stuck them in a closet and i went back like
two weeks later it was a horrible mess it was terrible
and this way is actually much much easier to do so we're going to
show you how to do that with some of our fire
lights because they have turned red and they are going to be
a gorgeous dried flower
we're here at the fire lights and you can tell that they have just turned this
gorgeous shade of red and pink so all i'm going to do is come in here
and i am going to snip the stem as long as i possibly can now
there's not a long stem on this fire light
because these are new plants we just planted these this spring
so they're still really tight and compact so if i
have these dried they're going to be in a little small base
not a big tall vase so you simply cut it then you remove
your leaves like you normally would
as every proper southern woman has a good old
mason jar and i'm just going to stick it down in there
in the water simple as that just as if you were making a traditional
flower arrangement now you're going to want to find
flowers that have the color that you want um so you're looking for
the shape and the color that best suits
your purpose now see this one has a little bit of a longer
stem on it i also think it's really neat if you can see so on this side where the
sun has shown on the flower it's red
but look at the back side it's still creamy white how cool is that
so we're gonna get these guys
strip them because you want to get the leaves off the leaves are not going to
dry very well at all you're just going for
blooms and then we stick in there
it's as easy as that so one thing that i have learned from experience when drying
the hydrangeas is that you are going to want to arrange
your hydrangeas in the vase how you want them to dry so
for example i have a really large this is like a you
know what a quart size mason jar right here and these are
short stems so what i'm trying to do is when i go back in the house i'm going to
get a smaller mason jar and put it in that so they're
not quite so crowded because once the hydrangeas do dry then they
become very kind of fragile and tender so you
want to have like minimal handling on the
hydrangeas because you're going to either damage your blooms or they're
going to fall off because they're nice and dry
so you just want to be really careful how you handle them once they're dry
and go ahead if you can put them in the vase that you're going to have them
dried in or at least in that same kind of arrangement now
i do want to show you a little bit of difference so obviously this is just in
a couple of inches of water and we're just going to let that water
evaporate and let them dry there is a difference as opposed if you
just simply stick them in an empty vase
with no water and you let them dry if you will notice
kind of how shriveled the blooms are i mean they just look
they look like a dried like they're dried up not very attractive
not very pretty but then you come over here
and you look at this gorgeous bloom and you can see that the petals are
still relatively open and flat and they still look like a
lovely hydrangea now for the most part your hydrangeas
are going to kind of keep the color they're going to keep the
color that they are when you dry them so
these were limelights and so they had already started to turn a little bit of
that limey color so they're going to keep that color
my fire lights are have that already have that pink hue to them so they're
going to keep that pink hue so they're not going to really
change color a whole lot now if you do have like a white one if you had an
incredible that pure white it might turn to like an antique white
but not a real pure pure white so just think of that
when you're drying your flowers next what we're going to do is some
gumfreena the truthful of pink this is about the easiest plant and
flower to dry that i have ever seen so you can
see up here we have multiple ones dotted
throughout the cottage garden and this is really super simple guys
you're just going to go in and you are going to cut
the flowers now i'm just cutting flowers just like you were doing a regular
arrangement and you just go in and you cut them
again you want to cut them as tall
as you possibly can and see and that one has
two on there and you're just going to make a little
bunch of flowers and you're just going to put them in your hand
and make an arrangement now there's tons we got butterflies look at that oh they
love it
this is definitely a pollinator garden for sure and that is
a i believe a hummingbird moth look at that thing
good gracious have mercy i think i interrupted his
feeding schedule i think he was going to try to come over here on to the gomphrena
because my goodness they do love the gomphrena
but yeah again you just never know what
you're going to find around here so you're just going to keep
cutting and trimming again if you can go to the
to the younger newer fresher blooms then it does really well
found that some of the older blooms will um they will lose
kind of shed as they dry i mean that little friend is just happy
here look at that i love it okay so i'm not gonna sit here
all day because i could sit here all day but
so you've got your little bunch of your gum freena
then this is how we always have in my brain
at least have thought of how to dry flowers so you're going to get some nice
twine here
you're going to try to cut it all right so i've got my twine and
you're simply going to
tie it up into a little loose knot just
big enough tight enough
that your flowers don't fall out nothing super fancy
just a simple little knot
and then you want to make sure you have enough string
that they can hang from so you can either hang this in a closet
you can hang it in the garage wherever it is that is a nice dry spot
you're just going to hang them upside down for about a week
10 days you'll know that they're dry because their leaves will be nice and
crunchy they're already very kind of straw like
it's great so we actually have in our house
some of the gumprina that we had dried last year
and they're still just as pretty and pink as they were
a year ago but these are great easy ones to do they will keep that beautiful pink
color forever and just have a great little
addition of summertime in your winter house it's
absolutely fantastic now we got one more to do
is the lavender so if you happen to have some lavender get all my tools here
so up here in the garden boxes i have some lavender
and this particular one is the proven winners
sweet romance lavender so i'm going to learn from last time and i'm going to
cut my string this has been a great this has been our
first year growing this and it has done really well it is a
continuous bloomer as you can see we're still in august here
and it is just doing fantastic so again you're going to go in and you're going
to cut just as if you were doing
an arrangement to bring in your house of course the added benefit of the lavender
is that it's going to smell so good just barely touching this smells
absolutely okay much like the arena it's gonna take your lavender you
can make it as big or as small as the clump that you want to
we're gonna take it we're gonna tie string around it just tight enough so
that they don't fall out
and there you go again hang it upside down now
where would i hang this i would hate this in my closet because
it's going to smell like this sweet lavender and then you walk in your
closet and you have this lovely fragrance of
lavender in your closet very simple
very easy but yet very effective and then
it'll keep its beautiful purple color throughout the winter so even in the
winter you can have your lavender right there with you so i hope you have
found this helpful i hope you have been encouraged by this and
one way to kind of beat the winter doldrums is to
take your summer garden into the winter with you with those three little simple
steps of drying these great summer flowers
thank you so much for watching make sure you subscribe to garden with creeks time
creek creekside and we will see you next time
bye friends