Out in the garden or in cut-flower arrangements for your home, nothing better announces the arrival of spring the way beautifully blooming tulips do. Extend the vase life of your blooms and prevent drooping tulips with the vodka trick!
Depending on where you live, you’re either right in the middle of tulip season right now or you’re about to be getting into tulip season any second now, so it’s the perfect time for me to be sharing this little trick that prevents drooping flowers. It’s a goal of mine to get a big grouping of tulips planted somewhere on our property this fall so I’ll have my own tulips for cutting popping up at this time next year, but for now, I’ve just been picking up a little bouquet of grocery tulips every now and then and they’ve been just the thing to make my home feel a little extra springy.
How Long do Tulips Last?
If you care for your fresh flowers properly, whether they’re cut as a single bloom from the garden in early-spring, or purchased at a flower shop or the florist to brighten your home as Valentine’s Day flowers, you’ll be able to get quite a bit of enjoyment out of your botanical arrangement before it’s time to toss them in the compost pile. No matter what varieties of flower you pick up at the flower market, if you follow these guidelines for keeping floral arrangements fresh for much longer, you’ll have great results.
When it comes to tulips in a vase, they have a tendency to get really bendy in the stem area and just kind of flop over. I happen to love the grace and beauty of twisty tulip stems as they age, like with the white flowers pictured above. If you prefer the elegance of a tulip flower arrangement standing up straight and looking fresh in its vase, you just need to be a little extra careful and diligent in the way you care for these lovely, long-lasting spring flowers. Start by keeping your stems trimmed every day so they don’t get overgrown and removing excess foliage that falls below the water-level in your vessel. The other thing that I’ve found will help keep your tulips looking fresh and upright is the tulip vodka trick.
Easy-to-grow home gardener essentials: How to Plant Tulips Bulbs in Autumn
The Tulip Vodka Trick
So here’s what you do to prevent drooping flowers!
If you want to keep your tulips from looking sad and getting a little out of control, or even if they’ve already begun to droop, make a mixture of one part vodka and seven parts cool water in a vase of your choice. Pop your beautiful flowers in the vase and within a few hours, you should see them perk right up.
- 7 parts cool water
- 1 part vodka
The vodka also helps to keep your tulips upright over the next few days because the alcohol acts as a growth retardant for the leaves and stem but not for the flowers themselves. The stems will not grow, but you’ll still be able to appreciate each lovely petal as the blooms themselves open up naturally.
Tulip stems tend to be able to grow an extra few inches after being cut so even if they start out upright, they’ll often keep growing taller and will eventually flop over anyway. The vodka stunts their growth, so your arrangement will always look the way you originally intended it to! Thanks to the Cornell University website for all the science-y facts! I always knew this worked, but I didn’t know why it worked, so now I do! 🙂
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If you don’t have vodka in the house, you can also use isopropyl rubbing alcohol! Just mix in one part rubbing alcohol to 10 parts water instead.
So there you have it! No more drooping tulips. One more little garden-y tip to add to your bag of tricks this spring! Have you tried using vodka in your tulip vase before?
Courtenay Hartford is the author of creeklinehouse.com, a blog based on her adventures renovating a 120-year-old farmhouse in rural Ontario, Canada. On her blog, Courtenay shares interior design tips based on her own farmhouse and her work as founder and stylist of the interior photography firm Art & Spaces. She also writes about her farmhouse garden, plant-based recipes, family travel, and homekeeping best practices. Courtenay is the author of the book The Cleaning Ninja and has been featured in numerous magazines including Country Sampler Farmhouse Style, Better Homes and Gardens, Parents Magazine, Real Simple, and Our Homes.