How I Grew all the Flowers for My Brother’s Wedding: DIY Wedding Flowers Grown & Arranged on my Flower Farm
Last week was my most ambitious project yet after starting my flower farm.
I did all the florals for my brother’s 160 person wedding on the 4th of July 🤯
Now, I’m used to making cute little bouquets to sell at markets, not full-on ceremony arrangements and centerpieces!! What was I thinking!!
BUT!! WE PULLED IT OFF!!
With the help of both the bride & groom’s family, over a year of planning, and careful babysitting of all the plants, we made an absolutely beautiful wedding.
Before I get in the nitty gritty of how we made this happen, I’ve got a few things that will help you DIY your own florals:
Bulk Buckets of Flowers: Looking for flowers in bulk to make your own bouquets? Order from me here and customize your colors so you can have the dreamiest, most personal flowers at your wedding :)
DIY Wedding Consultation: Feeling overwhelmed and want to talk it through with someone who’s done it? Book a zoom call with me and we’ll go over all your questions.
A la Carte Wedding Florals: While I’m not a full service florist, I would love to make you special florals for your wedding! Email me to discuss a bridal bouquet, dried flower boutonnieres, or bridesemaids bouquets.
The hydrangea baskets were my favorite part of the whole thing!! So cute!
Me (left) with my handsome little brother & gorgeous sister!!
The dried boutonniere I made was a huge hit
Here’s all the flowers we DIY’d for the wedding:
Bridal bouquet
4 bridesmaids bouquets
3 boutonnieres
60 bud vases
18 dinner table centerpieces
2 Large ceremony arrangements
6 aisle arrangements
5 hydrangea baskets for head table
Several more arrangements for bar, dessert table, etc
This came out to over 1,000 stems of large focal flowers, filler flowers, and foliage.
How we planned the wedding flowers
Potted hydrangeas saved the day and added so much height to the ceremony spot!
Here’s the outline of how we planned this whole wedding
One year before the wedding: Meeting with the bride to decide on colors
Over a year before the wedding, I met with the bride, my now sister-in-law Margo, to hear her color requests. She chose a classic pastel palette of white, blue, pink, and sage green. I knew there would be plenty of flowers in that color palette!
One year before the wedding: Create a list of varieties that will be blooming on July 4th
Not all flowers bloom in July. I knew the spring flowers like ranunculus would be gone, and summer flowers like dahlias weren’t starting yet, so I had to rely on previous records of what bloomed on my flower farm in previous years. I made a running list and tracked down if the variety was available in the color palette.
Order seeds
I already have a ton of perennials planted, but I needed a lot of annual seeds such as snapdragons, statice, didiscus, etc. I ordered everything from Johnny’s Seeds and a great local company, Summertime Seed Co.
Make a list of the arrangements required for the wedding
Once the bride nailed down how many dinner tables, etc were needed at the wedding, we could meet and determine how many floral arrangements would be needed for the whole event.
Start getting vases, baskets, supplies, etc
We thrifted all the vases and baskets and gathered supplies from family and friends. I ordered more supplies such as floral tape and silk ribbon. It took a few months to gather all the 100+ vases we needed!! Additionally, we needed a lot of extra clean buckets to store the flowers in after harvesting. For reference, most of the vases were $2-4 at goodwill and the baskets were $5-$20.
Estimate stem counts needed per arrangement
I do this by breaking things down into Focals, Fillers, and Foliage. Focals are large flowers such as roses, fillers are smaller flowers to fill in gaps, and foliage is greenery. I made practice arrangements and counted how many stems of each I put into each arrangement. For example, I knew I would need 20-30 stems per each bridesmaid bouquet.
Make a harvest list
I tallied up all the focals, fillers, & foliage needed from all the arrangements and made a total stem count. From there, I broke it down into variety type.
Organize helpers for harvesting and arranging
We ended up having a lot of people helping throughout the week with harvesting: Me, my partner Madeline, my Aunt Michelle, and my 2 employees Mary & Eliza. Then we had an additional 10 people who showed up Friday morning to help arrange all the flowers into the arrangements.
A snip from my spreadsheet. Here’s the first round of all the arrangements that we decided on.
Here’s an example of each type of arrangement, the quantity of those arrangements needed, and number of stems per arrangement.
From there, my spreadsheet pulled the total amounts needed for Focals, Fillers, and Foliage. These were minimum stem counts (I ended up harvesting a lot more to be safe and glad I did)
How we grew the flowers for the wedding
Once the color palette was determined, I was able to narrow down a variety list based on what would be blooming on July 4th. That’s a tricky time of year - the dahlias aren’t really getting going yet, the roses are past their prime, so I knew we might have to order in more large focal flowers to supplement.
In the months before the wedding, I ordered seeds and started them in my greenhouse and planted them out in the spring and babied them for months!!
My annual flowers in July. Empty spaces in the rows are where I’ve pulled out flowers that are done blooming and replanted them with summer flowers.
I grew a lot more white flowers than I normally do for this wedding!! This is a flower called statice and is a great white filler flower
One of a few cartloads of flowers we harvested from the field.
How much space did I need to grow all the flowers for the wedding?
My flower farm (as of summer 2026) currently consists of:
10 × 70-foot long rows of annuals
8 × 20-foot long rows of annuals
17 × 25-foot long rows of perennials
10 x 60-foot long rows of dahlias (not blooming for the wedding)
Plus a large perennial garden full of grasses, shrubs, etc
Not all of these flower beds were just for wedding flowers! I probably had a few rows worth of flowers that were suitable for the wedding. Since I do run a business selling flowers, I couldn’t just grow everything for the wedding!
Flower varieties we grew for the wedding
We relied on a lot of perennials like yarrow, sweet william, eryngium, achillea, astilbe, hydrangea, roses, and foliage plants.
I grew a ton of annuals that bloom in white and pink in addition to the perennials, including:
Amaranth
Snapdragons
Strawflowers
Statice
Celosia
Marigolds (white variety)
Nigella
Scabioa
So much more…
Here’s a snippet of one of my spreadsheets organizing varieties by type: Filler, Foliage, and Focal
Based off the stem counts we had determined after nailing down all the arrangements needed, I was able to estimate how many plants of each variety we would need to grow in order to harvest enough flowers.
I’d say there was probably an average of 30 plants of each type.
Timing it exactly right
This was the most stressful part!!
I have enough experience growing enough flowers by now to know which flowers will be blooming around that time, although July 4th is the very beginning of the summer season so I knew it would be tight.
(If you are DIY’ing and growing your own flowers, I highly recommend growing a trial garden a year in advance so you know when things will bloom, book a consult with me if you want to talk about it more!)
A cartload of flowers. From my experience, I know all of these would be blooming in time for the wedding.
Seed packets give you a lot of information, and Summertime Seed Co has a great webpage here explaining how to know what all the things mean on seed packet. You will see numbers like ‘days to maturity’ which can give you a rough idea of how many days it will take for the plant to bloom after planting.
So if you want plants blooming in July and it take 75 days to bloom, you need to get that plant in the ground by Mid-April/early May.
For me, I know if I start my summer annuals in the greenhouse in March/April and plant them out in May, they will have their very first blooms for the first week of July. (My farm is in Oregon in Zone 8)
Don’t want to harvest your own flowers? Order a Bulk Bucket of Flowers from me so you can skip all the stress of growing!!
Extra flowers that I didn’t grow
We ended up sourcing more florals from other places, as well. My grandma, the bride’s mom & grandma all have big huge gardens that we harvested from.
In addition to that, the bride ordered a couple hundred extra flowers from Coscto including: 100 white roses, 80 blue & white hydrangeas, and 40 cala lilies. Since we knew we were low of large focal flowers, we wanted to play it safe and order these extra and thank goodness we did!!
4 large boxes of flowers were delivered on Wednesday before the wedding! They were amazingly in great condition.
How we harvested all the flowers for the wedding
Our plan was to have all the flowers harvested in advance so we could do all the arranging on Friday, the day before the wedding.
If you’re DIY’ing your wedding flowers, don’t underestimate how long it takes to harvest! (Book a consult call with me if you want me to help create a timeline harvesting plan for you so you can get it all done in time!)
The wedding was on Saturday and we harvested for 3 hours each on Wednesday & Thursday (2 people harvesting Wednesday, 4 people on Thursday) at my farm, plus the bride’s friends harvested for a few hours at her family’s gardens on top of that.
Yes, that is several hours of harvesting. Snip, snip, snip!!!
Supplies needed for harvesting flowers for a DIY wedding
At the minimum, you need:
Snips (don’t rely on dull kitchen scissors, get snips from your local garden store that fit well for your hand)
Clean buckets (5 gallon buckets are great options. They must be scrubbed clean!!)
A cool place out of direct sun to store the flowers until you use them for the wedding (we stored everything in my mom’s basement)
A way to transport flowers to the venue (florals take up a lot of space and tip over easily! Prop them up in totes or boxes with towels)
All the flowers were crammed into my mom’s basement to keep them nice and cool until we arranged all the bouquets.
The morning of the wedding, my brother brought out his groomsmen with an enclosed trailer and loaded up all the flowers to take to the venue.
How we arranged all the flowers for the wedding
Remember all the dozens of arrangements I listed at the beginning of the post? I’ll include it again here so you can see how ambitious this was:
Bridal bouquet
4 bridesmaids bouquets
3 boutonnieres
60 bud vases
18 dinner table centerpieces
2 Large ceremony arrangements
6 aisle arrangements
5 hydrangea baskets for head table
Several more arrangements for bar, dessert table, etc
I DO NOT recommend DIY’ing a wedding this big!! Hire a professional florist!! I was crazy to do this 😂
But we still pulled it off with the help of family and friends. About 10 people came on Friday morning, the day before the wedding, to arrange all the bouquets.
This was intense!! It was super important to have everything prepped and ready to go before all the folks showed up. The day before, I setup several tables in the garage. I set out every vase and filled it with water. I setup snips and supplies for everyone and printed out lists of instructions to make all the arrangements.
What to use for vases
All of the vases and baskets and buckets we used to hold the arrangements were thrifted!
Facebook Marketplace is a great place to find used wedding decor, plus Goodwill has shelves full of jars and vases.
To make the basket arrangements, we placed basic mason jars into the baskets and filled the jars with water. Then, we inserted flowers into the jars of water so they would stay well hydrated for this outdoor wedding.
Create a daily schedule the week up to the wedding
I highly recommend opening a word doc and breaking it down day by day leading up to the wedding.
Here’s a snippet from my notes. I had a separate To-Do list of the tasks I could complete the week before so I could focus all my attention on harvesting and arranging in the few days before the wedding.
Screenshot of my to-do list the week before the wedding.
The real question…would I recommend this to people?
The short answer is no.
This was way too much work to take on, especially with all the other wedding commitments. If you’re doing a wedding this big, I would recommend hiring a florist and then DIY’ing a few of the smaller personal touches such as bud vases or arrangements.
DIY florals are perfect for elopements and small ceremonies
If you’re looking to make your own bridal bouquet and a few other small bouquets, then yes, you can absolutely DIY it yourself!!
I would love to help you make that happen. You can order DIY Bulk Buckets of Flowers or Book a DIY Wedding Consultation and we can talk through the logisitcs!
My partner Madeline and I all done up for the wedding 😍
I also made marigold garlands to decorate the rehearsal dinner!!
Looking for a little help to make your dream DIY wedding florals?
Bulk Buckets of Flowers: Looking for flowers in bulk to make your own bouquets? Order from me here and customize your colors so you can have the dreamiest, most personal flowers at your wedding :)
DIY Wedding Consultation: Feeling overwhelmed and want to talk it through with someone who’s done it? Book a zoom call with me and we’ll go over all your questions.
A la Carte Wedding Florals: While I’m not a full service florist, I would love to make you special florals for your wedding! Email me to discuss a bridal bouquet, dried flower boutonnieres, or bridesemaids bouquets.