I'd like to know who has time to cut the morning of a farmer's market ???? Sorry but I got a little laugh out of your post..... Martha.

Don't know anything about apple mint. Seems to me that if your cutting it the morning and it wilts, maybe you should try cutting it in the evening and see how it holds up the following day after it's fully hydrated.
Cheers Kim - BFFF.

Glad to add some humor to your day. I have only a small garden and thus can pick and make bouquets, kale and berries in 2-3 hours and deliver to a market that sells for me by 8 AM. I like to pick the same day and be able to sell as fresh as possible.

Hi Martha,

I am not familiar with apple mint, but I will second Kim's suggestion of cutting the evening before and letting it condition/hydrate, if you are having problems with wilting.

My routine is usually to cut the evening before, let my cuts condition in my refrigerators, or if those are full, in the coolest place I can find (which sometimes is my air-conditioned bedroom. My husband complains that he feels likes he's sleeping in a funeral home, but I am more concerned, as I lay in bed, about any stray spiders or worse that may have come in with the flowers!) Then I'm up early to make bouquets and off to the market.

Many (most?) flowers do better with that hydrating time as opposed to being cut and whisked off to market. Don't know if there is a list floating around somewhere. That would be helpful.

Dee

Since we also have full-time jobs in addition to a small greenhouse business and are vendors at our local FM, we really don't have a lot of extra time, so we cut the morning before our FM and condition them overnight in luke-warm water and hold the flowers in our dark, cool, more humid cellar. We cut ALL our cutflowers that way and we have not seen any difference in staying power and we usually sell out. There may be some flowers that could be cut at different times or condition differently, but we haven't seen any difference.