Thanks so much for listening to Grow Cook Eat Arrange. I'm sitting in the kitchen at Perch Hill

and the garden's looking particularly lovely at the moment and so I just wanted to do a kind of

NB to anyone who's within shouting distance of Perch Hill or not quite shouting distance but travel

distance which is we're open for the next few months, a few days a

month. And yeah, it would be really lovely to see you. So go on our website and you'll find all the

details of booking there. You can book lunch on three different time slots or you can just come

and wander around the garden. So it's garden only or garden visit plus lunch.

So I hope to see some of you then.

Welcome to Grow Cook Eat Range, the podcast of me, Sarah Raven.

And today I'm on my own.

And that's because I wanted to talk about all the different systems of staking that we use at Perch Hill.

And I suppose why is it interesting?

And why is it interesting enough to do a whole podcast on it?

Well, we use only natural materials here.

So in the old days, we used to, I mean, I'm talking only five, ten years ago, we used to use bamboo canes and clematis, green clematis netting, or pea netting, which is made from

plastic. And then as we really sort of thought about the philosophy of the garden and making it

as natural as we possibly could and as sustainable as we possibly could, one of the things that we

needed to address was our staking systems. So we decided we would

rather like to ban bamboo canes and we want to move away from plastic green pea clematis netting

to dute and to twine, basically because anything that is harvested locally here, wood-wise,

or twine, whether it be thick hotbine or thinner normal garden twine, you can put them on

the compost heap and they decompose, they're biodegradable.

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