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.

Monday, January 14, 2019

Flowers in January

The berries have all been eaten by the birds but now the colour in the garden is coming from flowers.

Winter aconites are the first to appear, the yellow buttercup type flowers surrounded by a ruffle of leaves, look great under the old pear tree.

Winter aconites

Snowdrops are also coming through now. A larger early one was given to me several years ago, I do not know its name so I called it after the donor, Mrs Robinson.



The other snowdrops are coming through under a hawthorn tree.

One of my favourite plants is the Hellebore, I have several patches now and let them self seed, one day I may get a lovely new flower as the seeds never grow true to the parent.

Hellebores

Last week I cut off all the old leaves, this helps show off the new emerging flowers, removes chance of disease from the old leaves and makes room for the new leaves coming along with the new flowers.

Before old leaves have been cut off
After, new leaves and flowers on show

Mahonia is also in flower now and a spot of sun this morning brought out the honey bees to have a feast.

Mahonia flowers, early nectar for the honey bees

Not forgetting the vegetables, today we had winter lettuce salad at lunch and for tea will have roasted carrots, celeriac and beetroot, fresh from the garden. Swiss chard is still ok, it will survive until a heavy frost then hopefully regrow for an early crop when the weather warms in the spring, something for tea tomorrow perhaps.

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