Gardeners' World icon Alan Titchmarsh warns 'prepare gardens for spring by doing three jobs'

Former Gardeners' World presenter Alan Titchmarsh has urged fellow gardeners to undertake three tasks now ahead to get their gardens ready for spring.

With the cold weather is set to take hold across the country over the next weeks, the expert has said now is the best time to prepare our gardens for the next season.

Giving fellow gardening fanatics a step by step guide of how to get their gardens ready, he advised to start by ridding our plant pots of snails: "(Looking in flower pots) What do you find? Snails, hibernating at the moment, quite quietly there, but you don't want to leave them, because come the spring they'll start munching everything."

While Alan showed how he usually clears his pots of snails, he said that it is a matter of personal preference, reports the Express.

Alan said: "What you do, is entirely up to you. Me, I've never been able to crunch a snail underfoot, so I know they've got a homing instinct, but there's a big wall and the country lane on the other side. That's what I do (as he throws the snail over the wall)."

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With the snails now gone, it's time to wash the pots, as the 75-year-old said that while they look better once clean, there's also another vital reason gardeners should give their planters a wash:

Alan continued: "There's nothing worse than spring arriving and discovering all your pots are filthy. (And you think) Oh well, they'll just have to do. You know, you're carrying on disease with things like this if you leave them looking mucky, and you start potting things and sowing seeds in that come the spring.

"So, wash them - warm soapy water and with plastic pots like this, one of these little kitchen scrubbers is quite good. You can soak the pot to soften that caked on compost inside and then just quite assiduously, clean it all off inside and out, to make sure that there's as little old compost on there as possible."

Finally, the presenter said that there is one more job for gardeners to complete ahead of spring.

He said: "If you want to make sure you can get on the soil as early as possible with sowings come spring, then the way to do it, is to cover it right now with thick black polythene like this. What this does, is to warm the soil up, not a tremendous amount of degrees, but enough to enable you to get on there rather earlier because you're keeping a lot of the rain off. So, it's not quite so wet, which means it's not quite so cold."

Alan also urged fellow gardeners to ensure that all gardening equipment is cleaned ahead of the new season.

Alan appears on Love Your Weekend at 9.30am today (Sunday, December 1) on ITV.