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.
I think that October is my favourite month of the year, the colours are wonderful as leaves loose their chlorophyll and the reds and yellows and oranges are revealed. Liquid Amber is lovely and the dark red leaves of the Vitus Vinifera Spetchley Red are some of my favourites.
Autumn colour
The asparagus is almost ready to cut down for the winter but the changing foliage looks lovely for a few weeks.
asparagus fernsTrachelospermum jasminoidesBerriesPyracantha berriesCottoneaster berries, a feast for the blackbirds
Plenty of flowers and seed heads to brighten the garden in October:
HonestyStrange drooping flowers and berries of Leycesteria formosaA rose Joanna Elise started to flower again now weather is coolerGarlic chives flowering againThe tiny blue campanulaSedumMarigoldsscabious burgandy bonnets flowering again It certainly has been a strange year for some plants.Chinese lanternsAstersCosmosAmberboa Muricata
Still plenty of fresh produce in the garden. The tomatoes in the green house are still ripening, cabbages, chard and leeks are ready, apples, pears, Inca berries, the last few figs and beans this month and picked the last cucumber for lunch today.
Chilean GuavaButternut SquashElder berries
The list goes on but enough for now. More news from the Walled Garden next month.
With the large productive garden like ours, there is never to ideal time to go on holiday. This year we tried early September, the weather had cooled from the burning heat of the summer and the harvest was slowing down.
While we were away I think the plants decided to work overtime and we came back to some very large courgettes, loads of tomatoes, the runner beans decided to start growing after refusing in the hot weather and amongst other things I picked 78 ripe figs.
A few figs from the 175 I picked in September
The sweet peppers have done really well this year and already harvested 26 this month alone, some of them are pretty big.
Sweet red peppers
The garden does not look too bad considering the weather vagaries we have had this year, some things are at their best. The sedum ( stonecrop or Hylotelephium) is looking good and the dahlias are beginning to flower well. Verbeba Bonariensis as ever is keeping the purple colour everywhere.
Asters are in flower and add more colour at this time of the year.
Now it is raining a bit and still warm we have reseeded some of the areas of the grass which have not recovered from the summer drought, hopefully the green will be showing in these areas soon.
It has been a busy time harvesting this month. Tomatoes have done very well all grown in the greenhouses.
Tomatoes in the greenhouse
We do like to try out different varieties and this year was no exception. Five varieties.
Front row: Santonia,Moneymaker, Zlatava, Back row: Green Envy, Gardener’s Delight
The Green Envy are ripe when green! makes it a bit hard to know when to pick but are lovely and sweet. Zlatava are a lovely orange and when ripe the middle is red, like a blood orange was the catalogue description.
It has been a good year for pears and they are dropping off the trees, so last week we picked as many as we could reach. It is very hard to know when the pears are ripe as they do not come off when ripe, but before. They then need storing somewhere to fully ripen.
With two big old pear trees there is a lot of fruit. Too much to eat ourselves. I have ripened the first pickings and apart from eating fresh I peel and core them, then lightly poach and freeze ready to use over the winter, pear upside down pudding delicious! Another thing I do with pears is to dry them, peel core and slice really thinly then put the the dryer I bought from Lakeland. After 6 or 7 hours they have shrunk and become a nice chewy snack, not much to look at but really tasty. Store in an airtight container, I use Kilner jars and they keep for ages.
I have been asked to include notes on the flowers in our walled garden. The garden is about an acre but it is not all fruit and vegetables. We do have flower borders as well as flowers amongst the vegetables.
Today I want to talk about Dahlias. For many years these were not my favourite flower, I associated them with the large immaculate blooms grown to show in exhibitions. Then in 2011 my daughter was getting married and wanted me to do the bouquet, buttonholes and table decorations from “flowers in the garden”. The problem I soon discovered was that middle of August was not best for the flowers I grew.
table decorationBouquet
In fact up until 10 years ago the only flowers I grew were either planted by birds or inherited when we moved. How things have changed, having “retired” to renovate the walled garden I have visited numerous gardens, attended talks and met many friends who are “flower people” and have taught me so much.
The dahlia’s I love are the small ball and pom pom ones and especially the Bishops Children, single dark ones, and the raggedy looking cactus.
Bishop’s ChildrenCactus Dahlia
This year I decided to grow from seed rather than tubers. Seeds for a mixed cactus and Bishop’s Children were sown under cover in January transferred to bigger pots in March then planted outside in June.
Flowering now it is good to see the different colours the come in the cactus and the dark foliage of Bishops Children is a favourite sight. I will leave the ones planted outside over winter, give them a good mulch against the winter weather and fingers crossed the will come up again next year.
It amazes my how the tiny seed can produce reasonable sized tubers in just a few months. They were grown by the Aztecs as a food crop, I tried this a few years ago but after tasting them I can see why they failed to catch on in favour of the potato!
Dahlia tubers formed in just a few months from seed
A while since I last posted. We did get some rain for a couple of days so the water storage filled up again.
Things then got hectic in the walled garden as we enter quite a lot in the village flower and produce show. The lack of water has been a problem and beans especially have been very poor but we did manage 3 first, 4 second and 7 third places. All good fun, taking part is what matters, the show was very busy, the dry weather helped I am sure.
No rain now but the temperature is lower and not much sun so the grass is growing again, got the lawn mower out yesterday! and the runner beans are now growing well!
Jewels in the fruit cage? A late fruiting red currant, ready now and looking wonderful hanging down in strings. We like them with a salad, on cereal at breakfast or red currant jelly.
Couple of days of rain and now sun is shining again.
Water butts are full again.
Verbena Bonariensis is one of my favourite flowers in the garden. Flowers forever and has delicate foliage so you can see through it so no need to put this tall plant to the back of the border.
Some people can not grow this, for others, like me, it grows like a weed and survives the winter, despite our being in a frost pocket. Verbena Bonariensis flowers for ages, loved by bees and butterflies and I leave the seed heads over winter, food for the birds and then lots of new plants for the next year. If you grow it and do not want a garden full then dead head it in the autumn.
It rained yesterday!! first for 2 months. The garden looks fresher already and a rose, Chandos Beauty Harmisty, that I did not think was a repeat flowering suddenly produced 2 new buds.
