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, May 16, 2020

May Frost

We always look at the local weather forecast on line each day to see whether we will have rain or sun or not. Especially so this last week or so when temperatures are going quite low at night.

There have been 10 nights in the last 28 days when temperatures in the walled garden were below 4 degrees in fact the last 6 nights were all below 3 degrees and 2 were minus.

Despite going out each night and covering up everything we thought need it, with fleece we still have casualities.

The list is endless, each time I walk around the garden I see another casualty:

Buddleja, Fig, Hydrangea, Hibiscus, hardy geranium,Japanese anemone, Cotinus Grace, bay, Yew, Magnolia leaves….. All these are well established plants but they have put on new growth a bit too early.

Even the potatoes which were earthed up managed to peep through overnight and the tips were frosted. And the cucumbers planted in the unheated greenhouse, saw one succumb but we managed to rescue others by wrapping in fleece inside the greenhouse.

Hopefully that is the last of the frost and most will recover. The problem was the last few weeks have been much too warm so the plants put on lots of new tender growth which has succumbed to the frost.

Spetchley Red vine with wonderful autumn colours frosted on 12th May 2020

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