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.

Saturday, September 1, 2018

Harvest

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.

 

Chewy pears

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