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.

Tuesday, May 5, 2020

May

We had a bit of rain last week which was most welcome and the garden greened up nicely, the soil is now more crumbly so is easier to weed and plant. The big cracks in the soil have closed a bit but much more rain needed for them to close completely.

More perennials are coming up and flowers opening. The camassia planted in the “wild” area at the end of the lawn are bulking up nicely after the original bulbs were planted 5 years ago now. I first saw these on a visit to Highgrove were HRH has them in the grass alongside a path.

Camassia

The lilac is out nicely now, pity it only lasts a couple of weeks before turning brown, never looking so good for our open gardens in June.

You may have guessed, most of the colours in my garden are pinks/purple/blue or white, with the early yellows(daffodils etc.) and an occasional splash of red or orange in the summer

This Pelargonium Tomentosum is in flower now. Kept in the greenhouse over winter it looks great now in a pot against a sunny wall. The flowers are tiny, very delicate but the leaves have a wonderful peppermint scent.

Pelargonium tomentosum

Spent most of today moving the brassica cage. It has to be dismantelled and put back in a new space, posts to bang in the ground, tubes to attach and the netting to tie on.

The reason we move it each year is to prevent the build up of pests and disease which occurs if the same crop is grown in the same position each year.

The cage works so is worth the effort as it prevents any of the cabbage whites from laying eggs with the resultant caterpillars on the cabbages, sprouts, cauliflower and kale.

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