I Tried 3 Methods to Keep Flowers Fresh and the Winner Surprised Me

Confession: my green thumb is completely non-existent. I struggle to keep the beautiful bouquets I bring home fresh for as long as possible.

So when I stumbled across a video that featured not one, but three different methods for keeping flowers fresh, I immediately wanted to try them out.

As someone who spends countless hours surfing the web for work, I know some TikTok at-home tips don’t work and some are downright game-changing—and I decided to put these tips to the test to see if any of them would work in real life.

I found three methods for keeping flowers fresh in a video by @thekwendyhome, where she documents each method in chronological order: Sprite and bleach, a penny, and a little pin trick.

Wendy found the needling method worked best with her tulips, so I was eager to see if the results would be similar with my roses.

Establish

I wanted to keep everything in each vase as uniform as possible, so I bought two supermarket bouquets and divided them evenly into four clear vases.

Next, I labeled each jar with the trick I was going to use and filled it with water, taking care to keep the water level even.

Finally, I cleared out the windowsill to make room for all four vases so they would all get the same amount of sunlight. I added some flower food to my control vase and started setting each tip.

The tricks

The first trick I tried was the most surprising: I poured a capful of Sprite and a capful of bleach into the vase. This meant providing sugar to the plants with the soda (similar to flower food) and preventing bacteria from growing in the water with the bleach.

The second method is the needle method, which is the winning method in Wendy’s inspirational video. This method involves using a sewing needle or pin to make a hole through the stem of each flower, about an inch below the flower.

The third method I tried was using coins—and this one took the longest to set up. Wendy mentioned being careful when choosing coins, as new ones don’t contain enough copper to prevent fungus from growing.

Wendy also said that if she tried these tips again she would wash the coin first, so I found a coin from 1989, I made sure to do exactly that by soaking my coin in hot water, baking soda and vinegar for 15 minutes before rinsing it with soapy water.

Process

I did the test for a week and honestly: for the first two days, I didn’t see any difference in my bouquet.

By the third day, I found roses blooming in all the vases except the Sprite and bleach vases.

Day four is when I started to notice some noticeable differences: the Sprite and Bleached roses started to wilt, and the leaves curled. I also noticed a difference in water clarity, with the water in the test jar appearing cloudy while the others were clear.

This continued on the fifth and sixth days, with the Sprite and bleach roses dying, the control water becoming more cloudy—plus, the pinwheel roses starting to droop. The control and penny roses remained standing, with soft leaves and healthy-looking baby’s breath.

Final Verdict

On day seven, it was time to compare each bouquet one last time. It was hard to determine a winner at first, but fourth place was clear: Sprite and bleach hacks unfortunately lost.

While the other three vases remained fresh and healthy, Sprite’s rose and the bleach bottle had wilted and never bloomed. The leaves were brittle to the touch, and the stems even showed obvious signs of bleach.

Surprisingly, third place went to the needle method—even though it was Wendy’s clear winner in the original video. While the water in the vase remained clear throughout the week, the roses looked pretty healthy, and the leaves were soft to the touch, I noticed the flowers didn’t bloom as much as my first and second place vases, and they drooped the most.

The roses that bloomed the most were in the control group, which had only been given flower food—although the water in the control vase was much more cloudy than in the others and the base of the stems began to turn brown—which means the winning method for keeping flowers fresh was the penny trick.

What will I do next time?

I recommend cleaning your pennies with baking soda and vinegar before each use. I think this made the biggest difference in helping my pennies stay anti-fungal, and is the reason my final ranking doesn’t exactly match Wendy’s video.

However, I saw similar results as her using Sprite and bleach. I do not recommend trying that trick.

The drooping pinwheel roses were the big surprise, although after further research I found this method works best on tulips and other varieties with hollow stems. It allows the flowers to get more air. Roses have solid stems, so this can affect the hack.

Next time I buy a bouquet, I’ll definitely drop a penny in the vase again—but next time, I’ll try adding flower food to see if it adds more blooms. If I bring home any hollow stemmed varieties, I’ll also combine the needle and penny methods.