Guide
Growing chillies: how not to do it
by Darina Schweizer
An eye-catcher or just creepy? How my dried bridal bouquet turned out
31.10.2023
Translation: Elicia Payne
I banished my bridal bouquet to the basement for two months to dry out, and this is the result. Warning: it could get scary.
My heart pounds as I take the lift 8 floors down from our apartment. The mission: to release my dried bridal bouquet from its two-month isolation in the basement.
As I weave through the underground corridors to our basement, a lamp flickers eerily above me. Is a mouldy plant monster about to dangle towards me? Or is a swarm of blowflies going to start buzzing around? The fact that today’s Halloween, coupled with my soft spot for psychological thrillers, seems to be letting my imagination run away with me.
I hold my breath and open the basement door.
A peculiar scent
I immediately notice a strange smell. Decay? Yes and no. The smell reminds me of mown grass in summer that has been left lying around too long. I carefully approach the bouquet, which is still hanging from its gallows on the crate. It doesn’t look too bad. Actually quite similar to two months ago. Only slightly more yellowish, as if processed with a sepia filter.
But when I take a closer look, I shudder.
The roses from the oven have suffered
Some of the florets are terribly shrivelled. That’s because of my Frankenstein-experiment. To test how the flowers react to heat, I dried some of them in the oven. I hung up the others without drying them. In turns out there was no need to worry about the slightly damp roses going mouldy. In fact, the roses that weren’t in the oven look even more beautiful. Maybe 70 degrees was just too hot for the others.
A new Halloween decoration…
My verdict: takes just as little effort as pressing individual flowers and twigs.
Even whole flower bouquets can survive drying (almost) without any problems. They’re a little crumbly, but once they’re in a vase, that’s no longer an issue. I’m just disappointed with the roses. The ones that were roasting in the oven look really scary. At least I now have the perfect Halloween decoration (see header image).
...and confetti for New Year’s Eve?
Plus, in exactly two months’ time, on New Year’s Eve, I could punch confetti out of them with a hole punch. That’s what I call re-re-recycling.
Header image: Darina Schweizer, image from Shutterstock
Darina Schweizer
Senior Editor
Darina.Schweizer@digitecgalaxus.chI love anything with four legs or roots - especially my shelter cats Jasper and Joy and my collection of succulents. My favourite things to do are stalking around with police dogs and cat coiffeurs on reportages or letting sensitive stories flourish in garden brockis and Japanese gardens.
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