Tysoe Walled Kitchen Garden: June 2021

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.

Tuesday, June 8, 2021

June 2021

It has been a while since I wrote anything here, things have been pretty hectic in the walled garden, getting ready for the open gardens.

After deep consideration we decided to do open gardens for the NGS, only 3 gardens in the village opened in the end, two large and one small where we did timed tickets to make it safe.

By the end of Sunday we had around 250 visitors to our walled garden, about half of our normal numbers but worth doing to raise funds for the NGS medical charities.

The weather this year has been odd and unpredictable but has resulted in many plants open in the garden which may not have been previously, so great for returning visitors.

No April showers this year but very cold and dry. Along come May and with it the rain. Here in the walled garden 25 days in April had night time temperatures below 4 degrees (freezing). We had only 13.3mm rain in April, half that of 2020, 9mm of that came in one day. Then in May we had 64.76mm rain (17.27mm in one day, 13th)

Temperatures only started rising the last few days of May and now in June it is so hot.

All this has caused much confusion for the plants. Growing seeds in the unheated greenhouse they did not know what to do and very slow or non-existent germination for many of the seeds we were trying to grow.

The plus side of this unusual weather is that plants, usually already flowered and going over were only just beginning so the garden had a different look for the visitors. The Iris was typical of this, showing their full colours.

In the front garden we have some paeonies, the oldest is almost white, very large blooms and usually petals are falling by now but….

We also have a big patch of Alliums which by open gardens will have become the brown seed heads. I have planted some Salvia Ostfriesland in between to take over when the alliums die.

This year the alliums were still purple for open gardens.

Unfortunately the same could not be said for the edibles, the first, covered strawberries were ready for picking but most vegetable seeds sown this year are struggling, hopefully they will get a move on now the weather is much warmer day and night and so we shall have a good harvest, eventually.

That’s gardening for you, unpredictable, rewarding and always something different!

Tysoe Walled Kitchen Garden