I think you will get faster with practice, I know I did. I think that I no longer fuss as much with each bouquet. My relatively inexperienced sister was helping me on Friday - she was overthinking it all and fussing over individual flower placement way too much. Given that all else is equal (freshness, unopened buds, etc) I find the customer will choose a bouquet based on the style and colour combo, and once they put it in the vase they can cut individual flowers or place them as they like it.

It helps to have the stems stripped of foliage before you start the bouquets. I strip a lot as I cut before it goes in the bucket.

Most of my bouquets are also a mix, but different customers like different looks so I do several other looks. I did some bouquets yesterday made up of only Purple Bouquet Dianthus and still-green Autumn Joy Sedum. Very fast to make, kind of a rounded, even look, and got a lot of compliments on them (as well as selling all of them).

Some customers like growers bunches, too. I did 20-stem Snapdragon bunches, some solid colour and some mixed colour, with no filler and sold them at the same price as the others. Very fast to put together.

Another fast one was 3 stems of Glads, 5-6 stems of coordinating snapdragons and filler was Sea Lavender (Limonium).

Yesterdays sunflower bouquets were 5 stems of suns, 2 stems of Amaranthus plumes (Velvet Curtains), and 3 stems of Panicum violaceum (I call it Panic Grass, but I think it's also referred to as millet). Again, fast. I made them all the same so after playing a bit with placement on the first one, all the rest flew together pretty quick.

It took a bit of practice on my part, but holding the bouquet in my left hand and placing stems with my right (giving quarter turns clockwise) is faster than switching the bouquet from hand to hand. I make them, for the most part, from the bucket and not laid out on a work surface. But for those stems that tangle and pull out 50 when you only want one, I take out a few before I start the bouquet.

Some flowers last longer than others and can be cut earlier than others. Maybe you could spread out your cutting to 2 evenings, giving you more time the evening before market to make more bouquets. I start cutting a few buckets on Thursday evening. I finish early Friday morning and then work on bouquets after that. (Saturday morning market). I get water ready ahead of time (both cutting water and preservative water in the buckets I take to market).

Hope this helps.

Pudge, that helps me a lot, and is just the kind of great advice that I was hoping to get. I do strip the leaves as I cut the flowers, so at least I don't have that to slow me down while bunching.

Thanks, too, for the suggestions of other bouquets to make that don't take very long. I sell sunflower bouquets that are similar to yours - suns, amaranthus (Autumn's Touch), millet, and wild tansy. They do go together fairly quickly for me.

I think part of my problem is the same as your sister's. I fuss over the placement too much.

I'll keep working on it. Thanks for so generously sharing information and helping me out.

ThinMan

Pudge is right, you will get faster the longer you do it. When I first started making bouquets they used to take me 15 minutes or more but now I can do them in about 5 minutes. Things affecting my speed are:
1) If I have plenty of flowers. I only do subscriptions so I know exactly how many I have to make before I start. If I have plenty of flowers it is always faster and easier then if I have to make them stretch.
2) How well the colors and shapes go together. If I have a nice assortment of spikey, round and billowy shapes in colors that go together nicely, putting things together is a snap. If I am short on one or another type of flower or color, then I usually have to fuss more to make the bouquets look right.
3) I have learned through experience which flowers will combine well with each other so I don't have to think about it as much as I used to.
4) I try to make a pattern bouquet and then duplicate it as many times as I can. I'll make all the red-yellow-orange bouquets I can, then make as many pink-white-blue, then orange-purple etc. If I still need to make more after exhausting all the usual color combinations, I make some one of a kind bouquets using whatever I have left.
5) As already mentioned, avoid fussing too much. What I usually do is put them all together as best as I can, then I go back over them and beef up the weakest ones with whatever flowers I have left over. Because I know I am going to double check later, it is easier for me to stop fussing with a particularly difficult one and move on.

Hope this helps!
Kirk

To help you stop fussing so much you might keep in mind that during transport your bouquets are likely to re-arrange themselves and part of the fun for the buyer is arranging them to their liking. As the others have stated the color, size, shape, and texture of the flowers that you group together are what is important. Just for fun put together a bouquet with less thought to arrangement and one that you fuss over and see which one sells first...you may be surprised. kt

Thinman - practice and experience with your flowers will make it faster! I have new helpers this year and I've told them they have to make 20 bouquets! I usually can do lots more, but I also do vases and the "bigger/more expensive" bouquets. We also strip the foliage as much as we quickly can when harvesting. We pick for about 3 hours, go in for dinner, and then head back out to "arrange" - last week it was after 2:00 am before everything was put away and ready for market! Ugh...we were all toooooo slow!!!! (I work fulltime too, so can't pick in the mornings...have to after work!)

We use our "short stuff" in jars (old canning jars, pickle jars, etc.) that we sell for $5 - just quickly bunched and plopped in the jar!

I've told my helpers to think of a recipe (which of course changes with the flowers over the seaons). 3-5 stems greenery or filler (lemon balm, solidaster, ladies mantle, statice), 3-7 main events, 5-7 accent flowers (salvia, crocosmia, etc.)

We usually end up with a predominant color of pinks/purples/whites early in the seaon, add reds, then move to the fall colors!

We are also trying to keep the flowers on tables at a height that keeps you from bending over to get them out of the buckets. I'm also not mixing different flowers in the same bucket (unless I have to for storage later).

Good luck, you'll get better!
Wendy

"...I'm also not mixing different flowers in the same bucket (unless I have to for storage later)..."

Wendy, by this do you mean before you arrange? In other words, all the zinnias are in one bucket, all the sunflowers in another, etc?

Or do you mean you don't mix them on display at the market?

I'm assuming it's the first, because that would indeed make for quicker arranging, but just want to check.

Thanks,
Dee

Thanks, Kirk, for your outstanding ideas. It's good to hear that you used to take about fifteen minutes per bouquet, because that's pretty much where I am right now. It sounds like there's hope for me to speed up with time and experience. I was doing bouquets of mainly zinnias, cosmos and statice last night. I thought one of them was just homely looking, but put it in the box anyway, thinking I'd tweak it this morning at the market. When I took them out of the truck, I couldn't tell which was the homely one. I think there must be a lesson there.

kt - You are so right about customers liking to do their own arranging, and it would be help if I could remember that. Thanks.

Wendy, thank you very much for sharing some of your methods with me. That will help me a ton. Working until 2:00 am? Wow! I thought I was working late when I'd quit from tiredness at 11:00 pm. You must have more stamina than I do - probably younger! :-)

Thank you all for your willingness to help out a relative greenhorn. Sorry I didn't reply sooner, but I hadn't checked back for a few days.

ThinMan

Dee -
Yes, we pick all the zinnias in one bucket (preferably by color), the dianthus in another, etc. Sometimes due to how many stems, etc., I'll combined the flowers, but only if its to speed harvesting up and I know I'll use them that night. We do "consolidate" flowers at the end of the night. Sometimes, due to space issues, I do mix them up, but try to keep shorter flowers in one bucket (i.e. for vases) and taller flowers in other buckets. I also put the last cut flowers in the cooler first and the first cut in first! My attempt to remember what I picked first! Obviously lilies are a good example of that.

Hope its going well!
Wendy

Thanks Wendy!

My lilies have been coming in like gangbusters, and it is a bit difficult for me to keep track of which were cut first. I need to come up with a better system!

:)
Dee

When I buy a bouquet in Europe, it will almost always be color-coordinated and the florists often use a lot of greenery with a few flowers only. They use all sorts of greenery including palm leaves (areca palm comes to mind), citrus tree leaves, wildflowers with more leaves than flowers etc. The greenery makes the flowers stand out. Their buckets and vases often contain bouquets or combinations of flowers and greenery that will work well together.
I like their style better than the mishmash of 5 and more competing colors and shapes I see at my local farm in NJ.

But Florah, mishmash is my specialty. I'm also getting pretty good at hodgepodge. :-)

It's very interesting to hear about the European markets, and if you have any pictures of the markets and/or their products, I would love to see them. It sounds like the flower-buying public in Europe has a different taste in bouquets than the folks that come by your NJ market or my little market here. Though I'm still a beginner, what I have found easiest to sell is a mixed bouquet of bright colors, e.g. red, yellow, orange, white, and pink zinnias with some Versailles cosmos, purple statice, and maybe a sunflower at the base. I may be wrong, but I also think customers here like to see a pretty high ratio of flowers to greenery, though my profit and speed would probably go up a little if that weren't true.

Thank you very much for writing about this.

ThinMan

Hmm, I always color coordinate my bouquets, to an extent. I keep the pinks, purples, blues whites together, and then I keep the oranges, yellows, reds, and whites together. So I have bright, hot, exciting bouquets, and the elegant, cool, I think almost soothing, bouquets.

And there are definitely people who prefer one type over the other.

But I do admit to not using much greenery. Although one reason is that I don't have a lot, lol.

:)
Dee

ThinMan,

I don't have photos of my own, but here is a website with photos.(not a lot of greenery :-0)
http://www.flickr.com/groups/875157@N22/pool/page2/

Thanks, Florah. I checked that out and also found lots more bouquets on Flickr. Thanks a lot for heading me in that direction. Very nice stuff there.

ThinMan