Dahlia Profile - Floret Bee's Choice Flowers
Hello friends,
Today's dahlia profile is for my Floret Bee's Choice flowers. I bought dahlia and zinnia Floret flower seeds from Emerden in New Zealand last spring, and sowed them in October.
From Floret's Website: "Floret Bee's Choice was collected from all of our different dahlia breeding patches on the farm and includes a wide range of shapes, sizes, and colors—no two plants will be the same! Most of the flowers will have open centers, which will attract lots of pollinators to your garden. If you discover a variety you love, tubers can be saved and planted out the following year." Planted in full sun, plants will reach 48 to 72 in tall.
Floret 1:
Floret 2:
Floret 3:
Floret 4:
Floret 7:
Floret 8:
Floret 10:
As you can see from the Floret Bee's Choice dahlias that have flowered so far, dahlias 1, 2, 3, 4, and 8 all have yellow/orange colouring, with a range of petal numbers, with dahlias 3 and 8 having extra frills. Dahlias 7 and 10 are shades of pink, with dahlia 7 has curled inward petals, and dahlia 10 being pretty plain.
In terms of choosing which dahlias to keep at the end of the season, the only one I definitely want to keep is dahlia 3, with it's yellow/apricot colouring and pretty frills. I'm also kind of tempted by dahlia 8, but I'll see how it looks as the season goes on.
I have really enjoyed the process of dahlia growing from seed, watching the process from germination, to flowering, and I'll definitely collect seed from them in autumn.
Have a wonderful day
Julie-Ann
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Processing Damask Rose Flowers For Rose Water and Essential Oil
Hello friends,
And welcome to 2025 on my blog. I did a bunch of stuff over the Christmas break, so in the coming weeks you'll see what I got up to crafting and gardening wise during that time. One of the things I got up to in November and December, was to harvest, and then process my own damask rose flowers.
Damask roses hail from Syria, and their flowers have been used to make rose essential oil and rose water for thousands of years, for use in both perfumes and food. In New Zealand, damask rose plants are hard to come by, and it took me a few years to get hold of two rose bushes from small, specialty rose growers. The two varieties of damask rose bushes in my back garden are Duc De Cambridge and Isapahan.
Duc De Cambridge.
Isapahan.
Damask roses only flower once in spring, and their flowering happens over the course of a month. After some research, I found a scientific paper which said that the damask rose flowers could be stored at -20˚C for a month without losing any rose essential oil, in order to collect enough rose flowers to process them by steam distillation. From mid-November to mid-December, I went out into the back garden each morning, and collected flowers from my damask rose bushes, and them stored them in our chest freezer.
When flowering finished in mid-December, I defrosted my damask rose flowers and placed them inside my Air Still pot still for distillation. After filling the still with enough water to cover the roses, I began distilling the rose essential oil and rose water.
After about twenty minutes of heating, the strong scent of rose essential oil gases began filling the kitchen. A minute after that, the combined liquid of rose essential oil and rose water began exiting the pot still.
The distilling process took about an hour, and I was left with 700 mL of combined rose essential oil and rose water afterward. The amount of rose essential oil was tiny compared to the rose water, so I decided to leave the two combined for storage. I split the resultant rose water into two 350 mL containers, and gave one to my sister, who likes to make natural products for her home.
I'm really pleased with the resulting rose water, which smells lovely, and in the coming years as my rose bushes grow, I'll get bigger harvests of rose flowers each year. My plan with the rose water this year is to use it in my cold-processed soap recipe later on this summer.
Have a wonderful day
Julie-Ann
Want to discuss my post? Feel free to chat with me on Instagram or Mastodon or Bluesky.
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