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.
We spent last week working hard in the garden trying to get rid of as many weeds as possible. On Saturday the Warwick Plant Heritage group visited our garden, the bindweed still managed to come up overnight!
It is rewarding to show other people what we have achieved in the garden over the past 10 years and hear their comments. They seemed to have an enjoyable time and with tea and cake available the many seating areas were used, until it rained. Fortunately this was nearing the end of the afternoon, so some people could stay sitting under the sun shade while others opened umbrellas and continued walking round the garden.
The roses were still going strong, the Alfred Carrier gave a wonderful scent on the arch as you walk up the garden.
Alfred Carrier
The Joanne Elise is still producing loads of blooms
Joanna Elise
Penny Lane is doing great this year, this has wonderful hips in the autumn
Penny Lane
Not only roses in the garden but more about that on a later blog.
There are many insects and bugs in the garden, some useful some not. As we garden organically we do not use chemicals to eradicate all those we do not want.
Slugs and snails are a problem for every gardener we try to keep the numbers down with the use of a garlic wash, especially on hostas, also going out and manually picking them off and moving them away from the garden. On newly planted seedlings we use the organically approved ferric phosphate slug pellets, sparingly. Once the plants are established we tolerate a few holes nibbled from the leaves.
Aphids are bad this year especially on the new shoots of the apple trees, squashing them between finger and thumb reduces some and a soap spray helps too.
Once the beneficial insects arrive it is best not to use the soap as we do not want to kill everything.
A welcome sight is this “ugly” bug:
What is this?
The few early lady birds have been busy and the sight of these larvae mean we will very soon get many more lady birds to keep eating all the aphids.
Asparagus beetle
This very pretty beetle can be devastating on the asparagus crop. They nibble the head of the asparagus. Later they lay little black eggs on the fern foliage and these hatch into tiny grey slugs which can defoliate the fern.
This is a problem because once you stop harvesting the spears, the crop is left to leaf up and nourish the roots ready for next year.
We try and reduce the effects of this bug by squashing the adults, the are very hard to catch as when they sense a shadow they drop to the soil upside down and play dead so are hard to see! We also have to squash the slugs that hatch to try and reduce the damage and prevent the crop from being completely weakened.
Each year in the garden is different. After a slow start, this year has been great for roses. This climber was already in the garden when we arrived (unknown variety). Over the last 2 weeks the blooms have doubled in weight 3 times with the rainfall events! Caught it in a dry period with its clematissieboldiicompanion, which is enjoying having cool roots. They just look great together.
Phew an exhausting but rewarding open gardens, which this year brought 456 lovely visitors to our garden.
Open Garden 2019
Saturday was very warm and with 10 gardens to visit our elderflower cordial was welcomed by many.
After working hard all week we were pleased with the results and the many wonderful comments made it all worthwhile.
The clematis, on an arch by the new patio, came into flower perfectly on time giving a wonderful display, Clematis Duchess of Edinburgh looking almost like a rose deceived many visitors and sunset a wonderful dark pink flower.
Duchess of Edinburgh Sunset
Sown seeds, self sown seedlings, division, cuttings many of the ways I try and propagate plants in the garden which give me lots of new plants to sell for charity. This weekend we raised £150 for the National Garden Scheme charity.
Plants for sale More plants for sale Wood store much liked by many put together with OCD!! The new Thyme clock is looking good
Sorry I have not written earlier but May is a busy time with seed sowing, potting on, potting out, grass cutting, weeding and numerous other jobs. Just to keep us on top of things we are opening the garden for The National Garden Scheme (NGS) first week of June so lots to do by then.
Wanted to talk about the architectural plants in the garden. These are great to add structure and height in the garden.
The Scottish thistle is very prickly and can get very tall but a wonderful addition to the garden. Beware of letting it spread the seeds or you will have a very prickly forest! I try to keep only a couple for the next year. Once it flowers the plant dies, but does need a suit of armour to cut it down!!
Another not prickly but just as wonderful, and in flower now is the angelica, seeds all over if you are not careful but I weed out all but a few of the seedlings and keep them for the following year, a biennial, so the plant dies after flowering but seedlings that grow this year may flower next, or the year after.
Angelica
What about looking good and edible?
The Globe Artichoke is a lovely structural plant and you can eat the fruits. So far this year we have picked 8 of these lovely fruits, a bit fiddly to eat but lovely with roast salmon last night for tea.
Globe artichokes
If you do not want to eat the fruit leave them on the plant to mature and develop into a wonderful thistle type flower.
Mike mentioned onTwitter about this topic just after I finished my little project. I thought it would be a good opportunity to talk about my little project a bit more!
I work in software and I suppose always thought I’d never do too much in the garden. Having moved out into the countryside though, the gardening work never seems to be complete! My preference is larger projects in garden; building raised beds; pulling up concrete platforms and my latest project has been laying some hedges from the hazel trees in the garden.
Along the side of our garden we have a ditch, supposedly a natural “spring” runs into it and then out to the road. It’s a bit of a chore each year to clear the leaves and detritus out of it in order to avoid it flooding the garden. However, with the arrival of a little person in the family, I wanted to make the garden safer. We had some picket fencing put in for half of it, but the opportunity for a fun project presented itself. Why not try some traditional hedgelaying?!
Where I started, big thick clumps of hazel cutting the light out.
Our “natural spring” ditch
As well as making things safer I wanted to achieve something else. You can see from the image above that the hazel trees took up a lot of light. I’d seen a lot of farmers fields around us that had laid hedges and thought I’d have a go. So I did what any elder millennial does when wanting to try something new, I went to YouTube. This one here was really useful. https://youtu.be/iGncS_lojlI. My personal favourite though was this one, pipe in hand and wielding the tools like they’re toothpicks!
I can tell you for certain that my arms were aching for months! That’s even working for just a couple of hours at a time. But there I was, full of enthusiasm and armed with my parents billhook and my pruning saw away I went! It’s important to do the hedgelaying during the winter months so all the new growth is able to “repair” the pleaches. Pleaches are the long cuts you make into the trunks in order to lay them flat.
My tools… billhook, pruning saw and gloves. The Silky pruning saw was essential but suffered (2 blades broken) due to how straight and close the Hazel shoots grow together
So after a couple of long sessions my body ached all over. 7 hazel trees and after 4 weeks I had just about beaten it. Hazel, it turns out is a very choice for hedgelaying because it has lots of very straight trunks. So I was able to cut out enough of them to make the vertical stakes and the binding to go across the top. That final bit was quite a fun and easier on the arms!
Making progress … and a lot of mess to clear up!
The final result is below. I took some of the lower branches from the big trees around to help add extra light into the garden. It was a lot harder work and took longer than I expected, but I’m very happy with it.
I’ve also taken some photos over the following few months as the new growth came in. We also now have a nice view of the foal who moved in next door. AND yes, my grass needs some work next! Next winter I’m going to follow it round the corner, but that’s spiky hawthorn.
