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

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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 Grow Cook Eat Arrange, the podcast of me, Sarah Raven,

and today I have our head gardener at Perch Hill, Josie Lewis, joining me to talk about the jobs in the garden that we do each month.

And this is a whole new, exciting thing for 2024.

And obviously we're going to start at the beginning of the year with January.

But we're going to give you the, just really in brief, just to give you a bit of a get out there and do some gardening list every month

and we're going to divide it into flowers and edible crops and so for January I'm going to start

with the edible crops and the first thing that we do early in the new year is we chit our early seed potatoes.

So we put them in egg boxes, put them in a cool place with some light, and just get them to form those really sort of short, stumpy green shoots, not the ones like spaghetti that you get at the bottom of the cupboard.

And that increases productivity of your

potatoes and also gives you an earlier crop. The second thing we do is we will start looking for

our rhububub closhes, our forces, and we'll put some manure around the base, if we haven't already done it,

a nice deep lot of manure around the base of each of our rebar plants,

and then we'll put the forcer over the top,

and that just gets them warm and cozy and gets the root to start putting out its chutes

about four to six weeks earlier than without the

faucet on the top.

Don't forget to look for snails which also love living under the lids.

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