Biennials to sow from seed to fill the May gap - Episode 224

grow, cook, eat, arrange with Sarah Raven & friends

Sarah Raven

Food, Grow, Home & Garden, Arranging, Arts, Cooking, Kitchen, Arrangements, Lifestyle, Vegetables, Eat, Eating, Flower Arranging, Sarah Raven, Planting, Garden, Produce, Gardener, Flowers, Growing, Cook, Leisure, Veg Garden, Home, Gardening

4.8 • 788 Ratings

🗓️ 15 May 2025

⏱️ 13 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Biennials – plants which flower in their second year – may often be overlooked by us gardeners, but between their value for money, wonderful scent, and versatility they’re among the best plants to sow and grow in any garden. Sarah makes the case for brilliant biennials in this episode of ‘grow, cook, eat, arrange’, exploring how she came to appreciate their beauty, and which varieties are best for all aspects of your space. In this episode, discover: How the right mix of biennials can fill th...

Transcript

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0:00.0	This podcast is brought to you by sarahraven.com, which is home to everything you need for a truly
0:06.3	beautiful and productive garden. You'll also find great and essential gardening kit and stylish,
0:12.9	lovely things to have in your house to bring the outside indoors, all inspired by the garden
0:19.8	and the house being tied together. There's also plenty of
0:23.1	garden inspiration, how-to videos and specialist growing guides. So head over to sarahraban.com
0:29.1	today to discover even more.
0:46.4	Welcome to Grow Cook Eat to Range, the podcast of me, Sarah Raven, and today I'm actually on my own, because I want to bend your ear about something that I feel us as gardeners
0:53.7	maybe don't take quite seriously enough.
0:56.6	So I'm going to bang my drum on behalf of biennials.
1:00.4	Now, biennials are funny plants that often people just think, oh, you've got to grow them from
1:08.2	seed or buy seedlings, so someone else does it for you. And yet you've got to grow them from seed or buy seedlings, so someone else does it for you.
1:12.9	And yet you've got to plant them in the summer or the autumn to flower the following year.
1:19.2	And, you know, is the room in my garden for something that behaves like that?
1:25.4	You know, do I want a perennial that I just put in and it comes
1:28.9	up year after year or I want an annual that just flowers pretty instantly. Well, I kind of get that
1:36.3	and really honestly, I only started taking biennials seriously when I was growing cut flowers sort of semi-commercially in that I really
1:47.9	wanted to be able to produce flowers from Perch Hill that we could use for weddings that we were
1:53.3	doing that I was doing at that point and supplying a hand-tie bunch business in London.
1:59.6	And what I found was we could have tons and tons of things
2:03.4	in, you know, tulips in spring, etc. And that was all very well, but they were quite expensive.
2:11.0	Well, they are expensive, aren't they tulips, to put in the bulbs. So I wanted to grow something that was a
2:17.1	filler that would flower at the same time as the the bulbs. So I wanted to grow something that was a filler that would flower at the same
	...

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