Keep Things Sturdy: Use A Common Household Waste Item To Hold Cut Flowers

Advertisements may urge us to think that the only way to keep our homes beautiful is to buy, buy, buy. Luckily some of us know that aesthetics, thriftiness, and sustainability aren't necessarily on opposing teams. For instance, you can grace your home with beautiful flower bouquets by embracing creative ways to repurpose old or unwanted items. Grow your own cut flowers from seed, use an old mason jar for a vase, and rather than buying florist's foam, use some newspaper sheets or shreds to keep the flowers in place and offer them support.

Maybe you are one of the — now rare — regular subscribers to a daily or weekly news publication. Or perhaps your mailbox gets stuffed with junk mail advertisements that come in newsprint form. Sure, you could deposit that read or unread household waste directly into your recycling box, but that would be scrapping all of its potential. You may already be using some of your newspaper to prevent weeds from taking over your flower beds. Now you can use it to help hold your cut flowers in place too.

Support isn't just for your friends — some flowers really need it too. While this won't be the most attractive when used in a transparent vase, you can wrap moist newsprint around droopy flower stems to help them stand up. And if you have an event where your bouquet needs to look gorgeous for several hours, such as a wedding, you can use shredded and moistened newspaper, wadded up at the bottom of a vase to give any floral stems a support base to keep them upright. However, this isn't ideal for keeping bouquets fresh for longer periods since once newspaper is wet, it will start to fall apart, and unclean water will shorten the lives of the cut flowers. If you need an alternative for keeping bouquets fresher longer, you can use a wadded up piece of galvanized chicken wire.

Using household waste like newspaper for your flower bouquets is a great tip for eco-friendly decorating. Florist foam, the product you're substituting newsprint for, is made out of plastic, which is not biodegradable and turns into microplastics. Plus, it contains some toxic ingredients that can cause irritation and hypersensitivity. It seems silly to rely on such unhealthy and unsustainable products to hold cut flowers in place when you can recycle a household item at no cost. Plus, once you're done using the newspaper to keep your flowers standing upright, you can let it dry out, and then recycle it anyway.