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.

Saturday, February 2, 2019

Frost and Snow

We do not cut down all the perennials in late autumn but leave many of them until the spring.

This provides several benefits to the garden and environment.

Birds eat the seeds from many plants including echinacea and phlomis.

Verbena bonariensis seed heads with a touch of frost

The “dead” flower stalk can help protect the new shoots that emerge in the spring before all the cold weather has passed. It also provides a shelter for many insects to spend the winter including ladybirds.

A touch of frost on the Stipa gigantea

The garden keeps height and structure through the winter to compliment the evergreen shrubs and spring bulbs as they start to appear.

snow on the dogwood (Cornus alba)

A touch of frost or a covering of snow makes for a wonderful addition to the garden in winter.

Verbena bonariensis in the snow
Sedum spectabile under the snow

Being in the middle of England we escaped the worst of the snow of the last few days, but we may get more later on!

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