This podcast is brought to you by sarahraven.com, which is home to everything you need for a truly

beautiful and productive garden. You'll also find great and essential gardening kit and stylish,

lovely things to have in your house to bring the outside indoors, all inspired by the garden

and the house being tied together. There's also plenty of

garden inspiration, how-to videos and specialist growing guides. So head over to sarahraban.com today

to discover even more. Welcome to GrowCook Eat Arrange, the podcast of me, Sarah Raven, and today I'm on my own again

because I want to try and describe to you everything I know about conditioning flowers, cut flowers that is,

because I don't often say this, but I think I must know almost as much as anyone about this

subject because I have been growing cut flowers now for 32 years and I don't really do events

very much. I tend to grow flowers for here and for home. And I don't want to

have to change my flowers more often than I absolutely have to. So I want them to last as long

as they possibly can. Ideally, a minimum of five days, if they can do a week, that's even better,

so that I can get up on a Saturday morning or on perhaps early one morning in the week on a

beautiful morning and pick some flowers and decorate bits of the house. Gosh, I'm not going to try

and claim I've got flowers on every single side table and every single

bedside and every single bathroom. But I like having a scattering of flowers around the house.

I really do. I think it brings life to a room and I really notice it for myself. It lifts my spirits,

whatever the weather, but I want them to last. So I have experimented,

like Billio, to try and make things last as long as they can. And so is Josie, our head gardener,

who's come from a very, very different standpoint, because to be brutally frank, she's not overly

keen on cut flowers.

She says, cut flowers, dead flowers. And I know what she means, that thing of kind of, you know,

...