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, December 11, 2021

 The weather has turned cold at last but we still get many warm days, and along with that comes rain!

There are a lot of old apple trees in the garden, some forming strange shapes as they were once closely pruned espaliers but were left many years ago to grow as they wish, which is straight up!

Some are cookers, Blenheim Orange, Bramley and Grenadier, others eaters, Wealthy, Belle de Boskoop, Discovery and Tydemans Worcester. One thing they all have in common is Mistletoe.

This was an espalier over 40 years ago but despite its shape it still produces lots of fruit and mistletoe and looks great.

We always take some of the mistletoe off each year to help prevent it from completely covering the tree and stopping the apples from growing.

We sell some of the fruited pieces for charity and supply a local florist.

This has not been a good year for mistletoe, I think it must be that the weather was too warm.

Some of the mistletoe has not produced berries

No berries here this year

Others have taken a long time to turn from yellow/green berries to the lovely white ones that everyone wants for their Christmas decorations.

We are usually picking the mistletoe in the last week in November, this year we only had a small amount by December, a bit more has turned white now and the rest we are still waiting for it to turn white.

Too green
Perfect!

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December

 We have lots of old apple trees in the walled garden with a lot of mistletoe growing on them.  This year the mistletoe was getting too dens...