Tysoe Walled Kitchen Garden: May in the garden

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, May 27, 2019

May in the garden

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.

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.