A cut above: Anna Pavord on home-grown cut flowers

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Comfort flowers are as important as comfort food in the dreary months of January and February. With a little forethought, you can set up a non-stop supply from November through till March. By that time there should be enough flowers outside to give the necessary lift to the spirits.

Cut flowers are good. But even better are flowers that you have grown yourself. They last longer. The choice is wider. And they are cheaper. The trickiest thing is to get the succession properly worked out, so that there's never a gap between one wave of treats and the next. 'Paper White' narcissi are like clockwork and flower six weeks after you plant them up. I started at the end of August and did two pots a week for the next seven weeks. Those kept us going until Christmas.

Next year, I'll start the narcissus off two weeks later, because, though the first hyacinths were planted in early October, they didn't come into bloom until the first week in January. That left us a bit short between Christmas and the New Year. They take a long time to develop. The earliest were 'Anna Marie', an easygoing pale pink and 'Jan Bos', a more difficult shade of deep reddish-pink. Colour is the first thing you think of when you are choosing hyacinths, but they vary too in the time they take to flower. The pink-flowered variety 'Marconi' is much slower to get its act together than 'Anna Marie'. Among the blues, 'Ostara' is early, 'King of the Blues' late.

So whereas with 'Paper White' narcissi, the only way to get a sequence of flowers is to plant in succession, with hyacinths, you can spread the season by choosing early, mid-season and late varieties. Yellow 'City of Haarlem' for instance, has only just come into flower, a month later than 'Anna Marie', even though it was planted at the same time. The smell, both of the narcissus and the hyacinths, has been gorgeous. It's the first thing that hits me when I stumble into the kitchen on dark winter mornings.

It doesn't particularly matter what you plant in. I use soup tureens, old enamel washing-up bowls, wicker baskets, galvanised tubs, as well as "proper" pots with drainage holes. But if you use something like a tureen that doesn't have holes in the bottom, you need to water carefully. Roots will rot if they are permanently swimming about in wetness. Blue and white willow-pattern china is particularly good paired up with hyacinths. It doesn't matter if the containers are chipped or if the glazing is crazed. And when the hyacinths are coming into bloom, you can stick twigs of hazel or small bits of larch in among them. They add to the charm, but they also help to prop up the stems of the flowers. Larch shakes out a lot of its little cones in winter gales and they drop in convenient short lengths, with the cones cobbled together along the twigs like rows of little birds.

With the hyacinths come the first amaryllis, or hippeastrums as we must now call them. Nothing you can easily grow inside is more outrageous than a hippeastrum with flowers at least 15cm across. 'Apple Blossom', which I planted in November, produced two fat stems, each with six flowers on top. They have not all come out at once, which is just as well. The petals open into a wide, flattish trumpet of greenish white, airbrushed over with pink. It's gorgeous, the most potent antidote to a hideous black, wet winter's day that you could possibly wish to have.

But sometimes their clocks get stuck. Last November, I planted seven different hippeastrums, each one set separately in a deep, fairly narrow pot. 'Apple Blossom' was in flower within eight weeks, closely followed by bright red 'Fairyland' which won the "More is More" prize: four fat stems of flower from a single bulb. But neither 'Chico' nor 'Pink Floyd' have shown any interest in breaking their cosy dormancy and springing into growth.

The same thing happened last year with a couple of bulbs of 'Lemon and Lime', a particularly lovely hippeastrum in the coolest, classiest pale yellow-green that a flower could possibly choose. I kept those non-starters in the cold frame all summer. One of them came into vigorous growth last autumn and flowered, rather strangely, at the beginning of November. And yet all the bulbs get exactly the same treatment.

You need to plant them in November, when they arrive in garden centres, usually after the first wave of daffodil and tulip bulbs. Use a deep pot, only just a little wider than the bulb itself. Before you plant, soak the roots of the bulb, setting it over a glass of water so that the roots can plump up without the bulb itself getting soaked.

Set the bulb so that its neck and shoulders stick up above the surface of the compost, then water the pot with tepid water. Stand it in a warm place (unlike many houseplants, hippeastrums love window ledges above radiators – 20C is ideal) and wait for a green nose to poke through. Flower stems come first, followed much later by strappy leaves. Once the flowers start to open, you can move the pot to a cooler place; the flowers will last longer that way.

Last year was the first time I hung on to my hippeastrum bulbs after they had finished flowering. I wanted to see how long it would take to build them up to flowering size again. None of the bulbs that performed so well last year have done anything but produce a few leaves this year. That doesn't surprise me. They are pumped up to such an extraordinary size by commercial growers and flower so extravagantly they deserve a rest. And a chance to settle to a more sustainable mode of life.

The trick, I'm told, is to keep the bulbs growing as long as possible into the summer, feeding them regularly with something high in potash. Tomato fertiliser is ideal. Then you need to stop feeding and watering, allow the foliage to die down and give the bulbs several months' rest before starting them into growth again. It's tempting to repot them at this stage. Don't. The roots hate being disturbed and anyway, it is unlikely that the bulb will ever again get as big as it was when you first bought it.

By the time all the amaryllis have flowered (the best are the weird, slightly predatory ones that look like orchids – Hippeastrum papilio and 'Emerald' streaked in green and maroon) the cymbidiums should be in flower in our sitting room. "You'd die without your garden, wouldn't you?" said a friend recently. No, I wouldn't, but I'd certainly die if I couldn't grow things. For the narcissus, the hyacinths, the hippeastrums and the cymbidiums, for the sight of dazzling blooms that you yourself have conjured into life, and which you can have inside with you at this nadir of the year, all you need is a pot and a few handfuls of compost.