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.

Thursday, November 22, 2018

November 2018

It has been a warm  November, until this week, and now a heavy frost today brings the temperatures back to normal, a busy morning cutting back and tying in summer raspberry canes at the community orchard and now back to my own garden.

The colours are still wonderful

Cotoneaster, gradually covering the house wall
The birds are not eating the berries yet
Yellow winter jasmine a splash of yellow against the wall

The dogwood is lovely at this time of year, the red stems of cornus alba and the yellow stems of cornus flaviramea

cherry leaves autumn colour
blueberries

The autumn colour on the blueberries. We grow them in pots with ericaceous compost, as they need acid soil which we do not have.

hardy geraniums

Even the hardy geraniums are going out in a splash of autumn colour

holly berries

A good year for holly berries so will be great when I start to  make the Christmas wreaths.

We still have flowers in the garden

Evergreen honeysuckle, flowering now

Marigolds attempting another flowering spurt with the warm October and early November
Pretty Cyclamen Coum
Clematis freckles, not a great photo I am afraid but such wonderful flowers
Wisley cream, another of the evergreen clematis such pretty flowers

On the berm, Delosperma, newly planted this year so hopefully it will survive the winter.

I love the leaf markings on this Arum

With the late warmth during October there have been a couple of delicious surprises from the edible plants. Picked a kilo of autumn raspberries last week

Autumn raspberry Joan J and Autumn Bliss

For the first time ever the second crop of figs have ripened (well 2 have)

Figs produce two crops each year, the first we have been enjoying from late July to mid October, the second crop usually do not ripen in this country, and stay  small, hard and green, then get picked off when the leaves fall to save draining the plants energy. Not this year, I have just picked two that have ripened, smaller, darker and quite different to the earlier crop, but just as tasty.

Second crop figs ripened in November 2018!

The garden does not “go to bed” for the winter just slows down a bit with bursts of colour and interest throughout the seasons.

My gardening also slows down with the cooler days and early darkness and there is less to do. Even if there are no jobs to do, a walk round the garden, maybe pick some things for lunch or tea, fresh air and a wonderful feeling.

Hope to do another blog in December.

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