Flower Picking

You might remember this post, where I excitedly planned to grow all my own wedding flowers.

Unfortunately, this summer was a weird one for ripening and maturing.  The majority of my tomato plants have STILL not produced a single ripe fruit (although they have been hanging there for months now) and all the flowers I planted, with the exception of a few sunflowers, didn't start blooming until after the wedding.  The sunflowers I planted in other peoples' gardens didn't bloom in time either so other than a couple of my own cuttings, I needed to come up with a plan B.

A friend of Brahm's mom just happened to stumble on Tierra del Sol one day while out for a drive.  Long story short, two days before the wedding my sister, two friends, and I headed out there to pick flowers for the reception tables.

I think it was one of the most fun things I got to do during wedding planning!  How awesome to go out and tour a small family-run farm and then be set loose in a giant row of zinnias.  The people who own the farm are so nice and we had the best time looking through hundreds of assorted flowers for the most perfect ones.  AND they had the cutest nicest dogs who loved me.

I'm hoping there are pictures of our finished tables with the flowers and their "vases" kicking around somewhere (other than from my blurry BlackBerry).  The combo of less than 30 bucks worth of flowers and free glassware looked amazing, and I was so happy that all the major wedding flowers (tables and bouquets) were from local farms instead of imported from halfway across the world.  If I couldn't grow them myself this was totally the next best thing.

Our bouquets came from Mistik Acres - if you click that link for their "Harvesting" blog post, the wedding bouquets they posted a picture of were ours!  I actually had no idea what my own bouquet would look like until the day of the wedding because my mom went and ordered it for me as a "backup", knowing I wouldn't have time to make my own bouquet the day before the wedding but it was beautiful - you can see it in the corner of the picture in my last post (with the sunflowers).

Buying local flowers - a super fun, easy, and affordable wedding idea!  The flower total for the wedding was easily under $150 bucks.  Mistik Acres and Tierra del Sol are both vendors at the Saskatoon Farmers' Market.