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, December 15, 2020

Christmas from the garden

 Each year I gather materials from the garden for the Christmas decorations.

We do not have a lot of room in our small house to put up a normal Christmas tree, sometimes we get a small one and cut one side off, so that it fits on the window sill! But recently I have taken a branch from one of the apple trees as we prune them and used that.

Decorated with baubles and lights it looks great and fits the space.

Wreaths are always made from materials collected from the garden. This year the one by the front door has a culinary feel with rosemary and sage, then a hint of colour with the addition of helichrysum dried flowers.

Another wreath is made for the gate into the walled garden. A framework made years ago from ivy stems and decorated this year with holly, ivy, mistletoe and fir cones.

We have a hedge of holly, made from seedlings grown from berries off a tree where we used to live. Only one of the plants ever has berries but we were lucky this year to get quite a few.

We sit in the dining area eating our meals, looking out onto the patio. So I thought it would be nice to have a table decoration on the table on the patio to look out at.

Using an old chimney pot and grasses, seed heads and other bits of foliage I am pleased with this new decoration.

The little Christmas trees grown in pots from seedlings are sometimes brought into the house but this year I have decorated one and put it on the patio.

With 2020 being such an unusual year with so many people at home over Christmas, some of them alone, the villagers have decorated a window in their houses to send Christmas greetings to everyone in the community. This is ours.

Have a nice Christmas wherever you are and how many you are. Lets hope for a much improved and fruitful 2021

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