Bougainvillea petals sprinkled on a wedding table

I found a new use for my food dehydrator, and it involves bougainvillea – of course.  In addition to making delicious dried bananas, fruit leather, and apple rings, I learned that I can also use it to dry bougainvillea bracts to produce beautiful dried “petals”.

I’ve dried bougainvillea bracts before using a slotted tray that I found lying around in the propagation house, but it took 4 to 7 days for the bracts to completely dry – longer when it was humid.  I had to constantly stir up the bracts to ensure even drying.  I experimented with speeding up the drying time by placing the tray outside in the sun, but the sunlight made the colors fade.  Plus, every gust of wind had me scrambling across the nursery picking up my precious petals.

Light as air bougainvillea confetti

So the tray went back inside my office, but with a fan directed at the tray.  The problem with the fan is that as the bracts dry, they become lighter and lighter, and by the third day, the fan was blowing them out of the tray.  Again, I’m scrambling around on the floor, picking up wayward petals.  (But notice how beautifully they fall to the ground!)

I wasn’t interested in pressing the bracts because I loved the look of them a little crinkly and natural-looking.  I looked into a freeze dryer for about a second, until I found out that they cost thousands of dollars.  My last resort was using inexpensive silicone crystals to dry my bougainvillea bracts.  After a week of them buried under these crystals in an air-tight container, they seemed to do the trick.  The problem was fishing these bracts out of the crystals.  Silicone crystals create a lot of dust, so sifting them out was a messy job,and the bracts had to be cleaned of all the dust.  Another bust.

Fun, flirty bougainvillea petals

So imagine my delight reading through the manual of my new food dehydrator, and up pops a section about drying flowers – in hours, not days!  Looks like we’re going to have a new item in our online shop very soon.  Got a wedding coming up needing natural confetti, or table-top decorations?  Email me and I’ll get a fresh batch made up.