You can find more information, photos and advice sheets on all the plants and recipes that we talk about in this podcast by heading to the links in the show notes or on our website at sarahavin.com.

Welcome to GrowCook Eats Arrange with myself Arthur Parkinson and my good friend Sarah Raven.

At this time of year we're going to put our heads round the corner of the year into the new year

by thinking about bulbs to plant now to have as indoor living arrangements by planting bulbs that we force for the winter months when the garden's asleep.

I love doing this, particularly because having a small garden, I literally have nothing to pick, so by planting lots of bulbs that I know will be in flower at Christmas and especially after Christmas into the new year. I know I'm going to have gorgeous flowers

and not need to go to supermarket or the flower garden market to buy anything. How nice. Yeah,

I agree. I quite like the thing of not having to wash your vases, a pause from washing vases,

and just have houseplants and living plants and bulbs in the house,

as you say, from Christmas right the way through until February

when the garden starts producing things like Iris Ritculatus again.

No, I couldn't agree more. And should we just

explain and chat about what forcing means? Yeah. I mean, it's, I sort of looked into this.

I remember when I was researching forced bulbs about 10 years ago when I was writing for the

telegraph. And I think literally what it means is that a bulb is lifted

as normal from the ground, from as a, you know, the breeders lift them. And then they put them

in cold storage, not freezing, but I think below sort of five, I think between like three and

five degrees. And what that makes the bulb think

if it's stored in there for, I think it's four to six weeks, is that, oh, I've had winter

and it makes it then think, okay, winter's now coming to end when you bring it into the warmth

of the house. And so, oh, now it's spring. So it is

literally forcing it. It's sort of tricking that bulb into thinking now is the time to grow

about two months early. That's as far as I understand it. Yeah, I'd imagine in Holland they must

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