Gardeners’ World presenter Monty Don revealed green-fingered Brits should perform one trick ‘immediately’ to prevent more damage to your plants.
The gardening icon was telling viewers of the BBC show that he had decided to plant a hedge in his garden along the back of the orchard.
The 69-year-old went on to say he had decided to plant a hawthorn with his bare roots, and gave some crucial advice about how people can protect the plants to stop them drying out and dying.
He urged viewers to use hessian sacks, damp it down and lay it over the roots – and he said people need to repeat the trick ‘immediately’ after receiving the plants.
Monty said: “Bare roots mean they’ve been grown in soil. So you make the order, they’re dug up and sent out the same day.
“When they come, you need to do something about them immediately. You either need to heel them in, which means just simply covering the roots with soil.
“Or you need to give them a drink for half an hour or so, then cover them up.
“Then as you plant them you must never let the roots be exposed for more than a few minutes, because these very fine roots are the feeding roots, they dry out and then die.
“So what I’ve got here is some hessian, and this is a really good trick. If you’ve got bare root plants, get yourself some hessian and just damp it down.
“That gives you a wet cloth to put over the roots as they’re ready to be planted. So I’ve got a damp cloth that I can lay over them.”
It comes after Monty issued a ‘warning’ about the best plants to grow in November.
The professional gardener says winter is a time in which he strips back his own garden at Longmeadow in Herefordshire. He says the impressive plot becomes a “sodden” and “brown” mess over the colder period.
In between periods of rain, Monty says he likes to use the winter period to plant bulbs. And there’s one in particular he would start thinking about planting now, reports Devon Live.
Speaking on the Gardeners’ World podcast, Monty explained: “Whenever the weather is dry enough we try and do as much planting as we can that needs doing, so certainly bulbs. We don’t think about planting tulips until November.
“So we try and get everything else done before November, we try, but it doesn’t always work. Again, you can’t plant bulbs in pouring rain.”
