So following on from the last peony post. Omg why is the word peony so difficult to say in sentences?
On the way home we ended up going a different route so we could take some photos and stop by Bunnings for craft supplies. I took home some awesome painting and resin stuff.
We had decided to start our garden again after the last batch of dead plants so I picked up another bunch of daisies. I’m honestly coming to a point where I think our location is not suited for plants and I’m thinking of getting fake ones again because this is all too hard!
|
Celina was nice enough to give me her peony bunch as well so I took home 40 of them to refresh in water. I stuck the whole bunch in vases in the shower to give them a good drenching and left them for a few hours.
While waiting, I pruned off all of the dead daisies and googled care instructions for them and the peonies.
I ended up picking some of this grass stuff at the farm too because I thought it was pretty!
So after an hour I went back into the bathroom to see how the peonies were doing only to discover the entire shower was covered in bugs. Not like cute little ladybugs… but each flower was COVERED in tiny worm like mite things and there were about 30 of these disgusting long flat ant bugs with pointy pincer tails running around my shower. SO GROSS. Back to google to work out how to get rid of them. So I tried the suggestions of swishing the flowers in a bucket of water to drown the bugs and shaking them off. An hour of individual shaking, drying, washing, shaking and trying to chase them down the drain I gave up for the day and let them sit in the shower over night in hopes they might be gone in the morning.
The next day I pulled out the best looking flowers and repeated the process. I ended up with about 10 of the 40 which didn’t suck and weren’t totally covered in bugs… just partially covered in bugs. ;_;
I refused to have wasted so much time on them for failure so I decided to arrange them into a vase anyway. Holding the flowers near the top of the stem snip off any branches or massive leaves.
You want something roughly like this:
Pick a nice big one and hold it half way down the stem.
Grab another big one (all of the biggest ones go in the middle) and place it so they form an X.
Add another one to the opposite side.
Now one between them in front.
Keep placing them around and around like that until you have a full bunch. Try not to think about all of the tiny bugs crawling on them. >_>
You can either tie the bunch together to make sure it holds or just pop them into your vase.
Done! So pretty and worth all of that work… maybe.
I decided to move around the whole tv area to make it more gardeny.
The peonies only actually stayed alive for 3 days after this and I was still finding those horrible pincer ant things in my shower hiding under things a week later so it was a bit frustrating. I did manage to take a lot of photos that I can use for flat lays or other random stock though… so I’m calling this a win!
I’m definitely not cut out for an outdoors lifestyle though… so next time I think I’ll stay in the CBD and buy some pre washed/cut flowers from a market stall…
CITY LYFE 4EVERZ YO! >_> |
