Tysoe Walled Kitchen Garden: January 2021

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, January 26, 2021

2020 Harvest

A strange year in many respects including the crops in the garden. The hot weather meant we were unable to water some of the areas in the garden as the stored rain water ran out. We tend to limit watering to greenhouses and raised beds and hope that the rest cope ok. Unfortunately the onions failed because we did not manage to water them enough. But the potatoes were huge so they had been able to take advantage of the moisture in the soil from the wet winter.

A few new crops were grown this year, Luffa, which failed to produce any fruits but more success with edamame beans and watermelon (delicious)

Needless to say overall we were not short of a harvest and as you can see from the chart we had plenty for us and our family with lots of excess along with plants I had propagated to sell for charity.

We raised over £700. We donated this money to; Tysoe Dementia friends and Pam Britton Trust for Dementia, ECO work-shop Stratford (for adults with learning disabilities and autism),NGS (National Garden Scheme, medical charities), MIND(mental health charity), Garden Organic digital library, RNIB (Royal National Institute of blind people), NCDS(National Children’s deaf society),

Friday, January 8, 2021

January

I was hoping for some cold weather this winter to try and kill off some of the bugs in the garden, this last week has certainly been cold.

We have a weather station in the garden that gives us details so we can see what has been happening over the past 24 hours. It has not been above 4 degrees overnight ( freezing) since 22nd December and most of those were minus. On 7th it did not get above -0.2 all day! Overnight on the 6th it was -3.8 degrees which was colder than any night for the whole of 2020.

If you do not have to go out anywhere, and many of us can not now thanks to lockdown, those of you who are lucky enough to have a view of one, it is nice to sit in the warm and look at the garden and see what is going on.

I do not cut down a lot of the dead flowers in the autumn and I leave the seed heads as food for the birds and a sculptural shape in the garden for interest over winter.

I was so pleased that I do that as last week I saw chaffinch and bullfinch eating the seeds on the Phlomis seed heads.

Now with the frost and snow in the garden everything looks great with it’s white frosting.

Tysoe Walled Kitchen Garden