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 17, 2023

January 2023

 A New Year and the weather is still up and down.

Now 17 days in we have had higher than normal temperatures double figures for nine of the days and reaching 12..4 degrees. Then yesterday it only reached 4 degrees during the day and dropped to -5.8 last night. So the garden is all white again.

The snow in early December stayed, along with below freezing temperatures, for more than 7 days. It was quite a relief when the white went. It will be a couple of months before I will discover how many plants I have lost but the biggest and saddest loss for me is the aeonium. I have built up a collection, from just one cutting, over the last 10 years. Adding a few more unusual varieties in the last couple of years. Apart from a few pots (all I can fit in the house) the rest, about 30 pots,  have previously survived all winter in a small bubble wrapped greenhouse. But when I got to the green house this year, after the thaw, the aeoniums had drooped and softened to a mush. They are a succulent so the stems had just frozen, and being full of water they collapsed and rotted. Apart from the 4 "special" ones, I am now left with just 6, 4 of which are the cuttings from last year. The lovely tall older ones are all lost.

On a brighter note, it is January and the start of snowdrops. Mrs McNamara is out now with many others, the green shoots pushing through the soil and the white tips forming.


                                                                    Mrs McNamara
                                                        The lovely Cyclamen coum 

                                Rhubarb is coming through too, so time to cover some with the forcing pots to get                                                         early bright pink stems, delicious.                                                      

                                                


September

We have been growing squash for many years and love cooking with them, especially the butternut type which have a lovely flavour. The proble...