How To Use A Turkey Baster To Keep Your Cut Flowers Looking Fresh

As the festive season approaches, we all dust off our less frequently used kitchenware. While seemingly a single-use tool, turkey basters can help us in other areas of the home, too. For instance, you could use them to keep cut flowers fresh for longer. Here's how: If your floral arrangements are looking a bit limp, they probably need a water change. To do this without messing up your carefully-curated bouquet, use the turkey baster to suck up the old water in the vase and replace it with some fresh stuff.

Fresh water is important for your cut flowers for a few reasons. Flower arrangements are actively decaying, and plants, including cut flowers, are made predominantly of water. When a flower stem or branch is removed from a plant, it starts to lose this water and wilt. However, cut flowers are capable of taking in more water, as long as the stems remain undamaged. This water needs to be regularly replaced to keep it fresh. If you try to remove the water by tipping the vase upside down or taking out the entire bouquet, you risk damaging fragile plant parts. The suction action of a turkey baster makes it the perfect tool for this tricky job.

To use this hack, insert the thin end of the turkey baster into the mouth of the vase and squeeze the bulb at the other end. Remove the utensil from the vase and deposit the dirty water into a bowl or the kitchen sink. Depending on the size of your baster and vase, you may need to squeeze a few times to remove all the water. Then, reverse the process to put fresh water back into your vase. Alternatively, if you have a hose-style kitchen faucet, use that to gently fill the vase with fresh water. You could also use a watering can with a thin, long funnel.

While some suggest switching out your water once a day for a bouquet that stands up straight without wilting, you could easily leave it in the vase for up to a few days. Any kind of baster will do, from a cheap option like this Long Turkey Baster for about $5 on Amazon to the fancy OXO Turkey Baster with Cleaning Brush that costs around $12 at Target. If you decide to use your turkey baster to replace the water in your cut flowers, it's probably a good idea — hygiene-wise — to stop using it for actual turkey basting.