I Was a DIY Bride Before I Was a Flower Farmer. Here's What I Wish I'd Known.

By Lahia · Burghblooms · Pittsburgh

I got married in 2011. We didn't want a big, conventional wedding full of things we were supposed to do just because that's how it had always been done. We wanted to spend real time with the people we loved. It was at a park in Pittsburgh. We had lawn games and crafts. We wanted it to feel fun and meaningful and like us.

And I did my own flowers.

At the time, I'd dabbled in flower arranging, but nothing beyond what I could pick up at Trader Joe's on a whim. I knew the difference between a focal flower and filler. I had opinions about color. But I had never grown my own flowers, never sourced in any real quantity, and didn't really know what I was getting myself into.

Now I run a micro flower farm and connect people with locally grown flowers for a living. And every time I work with a DIY bride, I think about my past self: enthusiastic, a little in over her head, wishing someone had just told her a few things before she started.

So here's what I wish I'd known.

1. Timing is everything - and there's a rhythm to it

One of the things I remember being most confused about was when to actually get the flowers. How many days before the wedding? What do you do with them once you have them? How do you keep them alive?

Here's the rhythm I use now for a Saturday wedding:

Order your flowers at least one week in advance. Don't wait until the week of.

Pick up or receive your flowers on Wednesday or Thursday. This gives the flowers time to open and settle.

Spend Wednesday or Thursday processing and conditioning. This means trimming stems at an angle, removing any leaves that will sit below the waterline, and getting everything into clean, fresh water. It takes longer than you think - plan for a full afternoon at least.

Design on Thursday and Friday. Pack everything up and have it ready to go before Saturday morning.

Processing and conditioning is the step most DIY brides don't account for - and it's not small. Give yourself real time for it. Keep your flowers in a cool, dark place while they're waiting for their big day. Often, the bathroom in your house is a great place to store them.

2. Your color palette is more nuanced than two colors

My wedding colors were orange and green. I still don't regret those colors - they felt joyful and a little unexpected. But what I wish I had thought about was the accent colors. The in-betweens.

When you pick two main colors and stick rigidly to them, arrangements can feel a little flat, like the colors are announcing themselves rather than working together. When you lean into the natural variation within those colors and add complementary accents, something more interesting happens. The palette starts to tell a story.

What my palette actually was: straight orange + straight green.

What it could have been: burnt amber, terracotta, and persimmon oranges paired with olive and moss greens — with accents of cream, chocolate brown, and a touch of burgundy. The orange and green would still have been the soul of it. But the palette would have breathed more, felt more alive, and conveyed that joyful feeling more subtly rather than hitting you over the head with it.

Think about your main colors as a family, not a single shade. What lives next to them? What deepens them?

3. Flower foam is not your friend

I used flower foam for my arrangements and didn't think twice about it. I didn't know it was harmful to the environment. I didn't know there were other options.

Floral foam is a single-use plastic that doesn't break down. It sheds microplastics into waterways and has no good end-of-life story. The floral industry is slowly moving away from it, but it's still widely used.

I now use chicken wire as my primary structure for arrangements — it's reusable, it works beautifully, and it doesn't cost the planet anything. I'll do a full post on how to use it soon.

4. Your bridal bouquet does not need to live in foam

This is the one I cringe about when I look at my wedding photos.

I was worried about my bouquet staying fresh without a water source, so I stuck the ends in a block of flower foam and then tried to wrap the whole thing in ribbon. It looked exactly as awkward as it sounds.

Here's what I know now: the key to a bouquet that holds up on your wedding day is two things.

Choose the right flowers. Some varieties hold up beautifully out of water for hours - dahlias, zinnias, sunflowers, lisianthus. Others wilt quickly (I'm looking at you hydrangea). Knowing which is which matters. This goes for boutonnieres and corsages too - maybe even more because once those are on, they are never seeing water again!

Keep it in water when you're not holding it. Have a vase of fresh water waiting at the venue. When you're not walking down the aisle or taking pictures, the bouquet goes straight back in. Simple as that.

5. You will need more bud vases than you think

I did all bud vases for my tables. I wanted clusters of them — intimate, collected, like they'd been gathered over time. I thought finding enough over a few months would be easy.

It was not easy.

The right bud vase shape is more specific than you'd think: medium-sized mouth, not too tall, not too wide at the top. That sweet spot is surprisingly rare. And when you do the math = 12 tables, 5 vases per cluster, that's 60 vases. You realize you need to start collecting months in advance.

Then there's the storage. And the label removal. And the washing. It's a whole project.

Start earlier than you think you need to. Check thrift stores, estate sales, Facebook Marketplace. Ask friends and family to save them for you.

6. The making is part of the magic.

Looking back, one of the most meaningful parts of my wedding wasn't the day itself - it was the days leading up to it. The people who showed up to lend their time and skill. Friends and family around a table, stems in their hands, making something together. Our wedding ended up being something that so many people in our community contributed to, and that collective making was woven into every arrangement.

There's something that happens when you're working with flowers alongside people you love. If you're considering DIY flowers for your wedding, know that the process itself is a gift - not just to your budget, but to everyone who gets to be part of it. The people in your life who care about you will feel lucky to get to contribute to your wedding in this special way.

7. Where you source your flowers changes everything

I got my flowers from Costco. At the time, I felt genuinely lucky to have that option — bulk quantities, ordered ahead, relatively affordable. And for what it was, it worked.

But spray roses and spider mums are a far cry from what was growing in fields around Pittsburgh that same summer.

Now that I've spent years working with locally grown flowers - cutting zinnias in the morning that are going into someone's bouquet that afternoon, watching the way cosmos catch the light, the wild texture that yarrow and phlox bring to an arrangement - I think back on my wedding flowers and feel a kind of gentle wistfulness. Not regret exactly. Just the knowledge of what could have been.

Local flowers have a quality that's almost impossible to describe until you've held them. They're more vivid. More alive. They haven't traveled across the world in a refrigerated plane. They were growing in the ground days ago, sometimes hours ago. And the varieties you find at a local farm, the ones that don't ship well and therefore never make it to big box stores, are always the most spectacular ones.

A handful of zinnias in every shade of coral and gold. Cosmos so delicate they look like they floated in from somewhere else. The quiet drama of yarrow and phlox tucked into the edges of an arrangement. That's the difference.

You can do this. And you don't have to figure it all out alone.

DIY wedding flowers are one of the most meaningful things you can bring to your day. There's something that happens when you've touched the flowers yourself, when you've arranged them and tended to them and carried them. It's yours in a way that nothing ordered from a catalog ever could be.

I just wish someone had handed me a cheat sheet back in 2011.

If you're planning a DIY wedding in Pittsburgh and want locally grown stems that are already curated to work together, that's exactly what our DIY flower buckets are for. You pick the color direction. I grow and gather the rest.

Grown with intention. Cut for your day.

— Lahia, Burghblooms