gardening at home with sarah | a frosty walk through the cutting garden

Join Sarah as she walks through the tulip beds on a frosty but beautifully sunny morning.

It is honestly the most beautiful morning, we are just being so blessed with these incredibly beautiful starts to the day, and with the bird song and everything, but today really reminds me of the first day I had a course, 23 years ago now at the beginning of April just like it is today, and it was a very, very hard frost and I’d planted 2000 tulips for all the customers coming on my first course to pick and I came down in the morning and there had been this hard frost and they were all bent double and I was completely devastated and totally panicking as everyone was arriving and I rang the RHS and I rang a friend of mine who was a farmer and asked him what to do, and they said what I should do is with as with vineyards you should water and that apparently makes them thaw more gently. But anyway, what I learnt is it just doesn’t matter. The frost appears to be devastating and everything looks very one, but by 11 o’ clock everything’s thawed and it’s all absolutely perfect and completely upright so don’t panic if you get a hard frost, unless you’ve got half-hardies out there, all the bulbs will be completely fine.