Hydrangea Experiment

 

My back-door neighbor has been inviting me all summer to take some of her hydrangea blooms. Friday she moved into an assisted-living apartment; today I went over and cut some fresh blooms since she won’t be looking at them thru her condo window anymore. I like the Annabelle hydrangeas when they first bloom and are fluffy and white. They turn a lime green as they mature.

I did harvest two green blooms a few weeks ago. I wanted to experiment with drying them. I think I may have done OK. There is varying advice about drying, but those who have done quite a bit of it say the real key is picking the blooms at the right time. August through October is prime picking time, but assessing whether the bloom is ready is an art.

The green blooms which I placed in a vase of water now feel papery. I am using the method where one places the blooms with all leaves stripped off in a few inches of water and puts the vase out of sunlight. I probably used too much water so it is taking fairly long to evaporate, but the blooms seem to be doing what I wanted.

Today I picked fluffy white blooms to enjoy, a new crop finally. They won’t be fit to dry since I picked them when they were too moist. However, I picked a green bloom with tinges of pink from the vacant house to the west of me; we can barely see the blooms through our bedroom window and most others cannot see them at all unless they sit on the adjoining patio. It still feels a little springy though, so I am not sure how it will turn out. Right now I have it combined with the fluffy white ones for a few days. I am going to wait about a week and pick the only other bloom on the bush when it it drier. Then I can compare. By next year new neighbors will be in both of these residences so I may have no blooms unless my new neighbor shares. Grace Village planted 3 hydrangea bushes next to my west wall. They each had one puny pinkish bloom this year, but maybe next autumn I will have some hydrangea blooms of my own and know how to dry them. That’s the idea anyway.

I will try arranging the green blooms with the pee gee hydrangeas I bought online last year.

After lots of humidity and heat, we now have beautiful cooler weather for a few days. It was 56 when I got up this morning.

My week has very few items on the calendar. My sister-in-law sold her house yesterday for a cash offer above the listing price. God is so good. After this week, I will offer to help her pack up some things, especially a full curio cabinet of fragile items. We made $193 on our garage sale, part of a community-wide sale Friday and Saturday. I took our few remaining things to Good Will store yesterday afternoon. I am looking forward to a relaxing week.