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.

Monday, November 9, 2020

What is in the garden?

Looking around the garden we found some eggs. Can you identify them?

Answers at the end of this post.

October is the time for harvesting and clearing some of the vegetables that have finished, digging up the last of the potatoes to store for winter and any late apples.

Then as we move in to November leaves are falling from the trees. This is a “crop” to harvest so we rake these up and store in a large compost bin. Over the next twelve months they will reduce in volume until it turns into a beautiful leaf mould compost.

Brilliant for mulching all round the garden.

Last year we produced a tonne builders bag overflowing with this wonderful compost.

The compost bins are filling up this time of year too. Lots of shredding of plant material to make the compost:

As the potatoes are dug up the top plant (haulm) can go in the compost unless they are diseased such as blight. In that case they must be burnt or put in green waste.

The first frosts will blacken the dahlias and the stems can now be cut down and composted. The tubers can be dug up and stored in cool dry shed or left in the ground, covered by a thick mulch.

Sweet corn are all harvested now so the plants can be dug up, shredded and composted.

Some perennials can be cut down and composted. We leave most until the spring , unless they have blackened, they give structure to the winter garden, look great in the frost and provide a safe place for many insects to spend the winter.

Now is also the time to start the winter prune of soft fruit and top fruit trees. Blackcurrants should be pruned before Christmas so can be shredded and composted and once the apples and pears have lost their leaves and gone dormant they can be pruned, yet more compost material.

Always something to do in the garden!

Answers from left : pigeon egg, grass snake egg, aubergine (egg plant)

February 2024

 What a wet and soggy month. Very few days have been dry enough to do any work on the soil, but we have managed to prune all the fruit trees...