Tysoe Walled Kitchen Garden

Welcome to the Tysoe Walled Kitchen Garden website! We are committed to organic gardening. Using the best practices from the Victorian days (i.e. lots of horse manure) and knowledge gleaned from the Ryton Organic Gardens we have set out to tame our Warwickshire clay. It’s all about sustainability, so as well as organic gardening, we’re always looking to better ways to work with our environment.

On this site you can find out about our history and the projects we are working on. You can come visit the garden and learn about organic gardening. Follow our blog to see what’s on our mind in the garden this month.

For the first 8 years all the work was carried out by just the two of us. Now we have help and are passing on our knowledge to students on the WRAGS (Work and Retrain As a Gardener Scheme).

We also find time to be involved with the WOT2Grow Community Orchard in Tysoe and have planted a 3 acre wood close to Tysoe, just over the border in Oxfordshire with a grant from the Woodland Trust.

Sunday, August 26, 2018

Not just vegetables

I have been asked to include notes on the flowers in our walled garden. The garden is about an acre but it is not all fruit and vegetables. We do have flower borders as well as flowers amongst the vegetables.

Today I want to talk about Dahlias. For many years these were not my favourite flower, I associated them with the large immaculate blooms grown to show in exhibitions. Then in 2011 my daughter was getting married and wanted me to do the bouquet, buttonholes and table decorations from “flowers in the garden”. The problem I soon discovered was that middle of August was not best for the flowers I grew.

table decoration
Bouquet

In fact up until 10 years ago the only flowers I grew were either planted by birds or inherited when we moved. How things have changed, having “retired” to renovate  the walled garden I have visited numerous gardens, attended talks and met many friends who are “flower people” and have taught me so much.

The dahlia’s I love are the small ball and pom pom ones and especially the Bishops Children, single dark ones, and the raggedy looking cactus.

Bishop’s Children
Cactus Dahlia

This year I decided to grow from seed  rather than tubers. Seeds for a mixed cactus and Bishop’s Children were sown under cover in January transferred to bigger pots in March then planted outside in June.

Flowering now it is good to see the different colours the come in the cactus and the dark foliage of Bishops Children is a favourite sight. I will leave the ones planted outside over winter, give them a good mulch against the winter weather and fingers crossed the will come  up again next year.

It amazes my how the tiny seed can produce reasonable sized tubers in just a few months. They were grown by the Aztecs as a food crop, I tried this a few years ago but after tasting them I can see why they failed to catch on in favour of the potato!

Dahlia tubers formed in just a few months from seed

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