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Welcome to Grow Cook Eat Arrange with me Sarah Raven and me Sarah Raven today. No guest.

So I'm going to be doing increasing numbers of solar episodes scattered through with guests in between. But today I thought I had talked about harvesting techniques and part of our theme

of 12 best tips, really, or 12 best plants. I just realized I spend pretty much every day of my

life harvesting something. And so over the last 30 years of gardening here, I've kind of worked out how it's most

efficient, how it works best, and how it then makes the thing that I've harvested last

longest. So there's some repetition of things I've talked about in the past in this one,

about conditioning flowers, but I just wanted to do the 12 most important points both

food and for flowers that I draw on and a sort of second nature to me here every day and I'm wanting

to them hand over to you so you get better value really out of what you've grown.

So starting with food, at this time if you're in the spring, the thing I'm probably picking more than anything else are salad leaves and herbs.

So it's things like Mitsunas, the mustards, the rockets, winter purse, lane onto the cut and come again, salad leaves, etc.

And then in terms of the hardy herbs, I'm picking flat leaf parsley, cherville and coriander,

particularly, as well as now, by this stage in the year, a few of the perennial herbs like mint

and tarragon and chives

and fennel, they're all coming up too. Anyway, with all of those, there is something that I do

completely second nature for me is that I go into the kitchen and we have a big pot of rubber

bands and I put them all the way up my left hand wrist and in my

right hand I go out into the garden with a calendar and I tend to use a big catering calendar so I've got

lots of room without crushing things but you know I pick salad which I'll come on to to last three or four

days I'll come on to her to store four days. I'll come on to how to store it.

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