If you've been enjoying this podcast over weeks or months or even years, I'd be so grateful

if you could please leave us a five-star review so others can hear about the show. Thanks so much.

Welcome to Grow Cook Eat Arrange, the podcast of me, Sarah Raven, and a series of guests, but actually today is just me on my own.

And that's because I want to chat about one of the things that's really interested me so much in the last, definitely five years, but actually probably more like 10.

And that's trying to make your spring bulbs as sustainable as they can possibly be, i.e.

that if you follow a few rules, you shouldn't need to be buying them

every year at all.

Now, I have lots of friends in Holland, in the Netherlands, and I've always found it in a way quite sad and rather challenging that they think of

tulips in particular as annuals.

I mean, they literally lift them out of their gardens or out of their pots and compost

them if you're lucky or bin them.

But the reason for that is very, very clear and strong,

which is the alarm about tulip fire and disease,

but particularly the fungal disease, infecting their soil,

and so their gardens, and so that they can't then plant tulips there the following

spring. So I do completely get that. So that's perhaps the first thing that I'm going to touch on,

which is as all of your tulips are coming up into flower, I want everyone to go outside and just

check that none of them, particularly the ones that you've left from the previous year,

haven't got what's called tulip blight.

And how you'll tell is it looks like they've been in a hailstorm and the leaves are really,

they've got sort of almost like pop marks over them and then you'll see

little similar smaller marks sort of, you know, like almost like burns over the petals and they

...