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.

Thursday, February 24, 2022

Prolong the attraction

 Nearly the end of February and time to start a bit of tidying and pruning in the garden. I keep most of the seed heads over winter as they provide architectural interest during the winter months and also food and shelter for wildlife.

We have to start clearing some of it away now as new growth is appearing and this may be damaged if we cut back the old too late.

One thing we have done is to cut back the old flower stalks of the globe artichokes. We grew these perennial plants from seeds many years ago and they not only provide a tasty harvest, but by August we start to leave some of the globes to flower, a beautiful blue.

These seed heads are then left to mature, provide seeds for the birds and other wildlife over winter before being cut down in February. The old foliage has been cleared and new growth appears from December.

Some of the seed heads are still intact so this year I put them on the “metal leaves” art installation to create this:

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