In St. Michael’s Bouquet Garden we grow cut flowers to make fresh bouquets for the Snohomish Community Food Bank. In 2025, we provided over 900 bouquets and the Food Bank has asked for even more! Flower bouquets bring a smile to the Food Bank’s clients, and they really appreciate knowing the flowers were grown just for them! Our goal this year is 50 bouquets each Tuesday and Friday during the growing season.

To continue increasing the number of bouquets we provide, we are looking for volunteers to:

1. Help harvest flowers in the Bouquet Garden (next to the fenced vegetable garden) on Tuesday and Friday mornings starting in mid-May.

2. Grow flowers in their own gardens and deliver a bucket or two to St. Michael’s Garden early on Tuesday and / or Friday mornings (or the previous evening).

3. Join our Bouquet Team to assemble and wrap bouquets for delivery to the Food Bank.

If you are interested in growing and donating flowers for Food Bank bouquets, more details are below. 

Good flowers for bouquets:
· Common, and very desirable, perennial flowers include peonies, delphiniums, ladies’ mantle, calla lilies, solidago, gladiolus, liatris, and dahlias.
· Good annual cut flowers include zinnias, statice, snapdragons, sunflowers, cosmos, and larkspur.
· It’s also fun to experiment with less common flowers like crocosmia, sanguisorba, echinacea, grasses, and others that can add special interest to bouquets.

Technical considerations:
· Cut flower stems 18 – 24” long 
When selecting, avoid dwarf types - look for varieties that grow 18 – 36” tall.

· Look up how to best harvest different flowers at different stages for best vase life
Ex. Peonies are best harvested at a late bud or “marshmallow” stage while zinnias should be fully open. Spike-type flowers are usually harvested with about 1/3 of the florets open. YouTube and Google are you best friends for this information!

· Please “condition” the cut flowers. Harvest them up to one day before, strip the leaves from the stems, and immediately put them in a bucket with several inches of water. Keep them in a cool location until bringing them to the garden.

· Flowers should have a vase life of at least one week. It’s good to experiment with what you grow to see if the vase life is sufficient.