Tysoe Walled Kitchen Garden: Aeonium

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.

Thursday, May 2, 2019

Aeonium

A plant I have grown to love over the past few years and now it is one of my favourites.

The dark coloured aeonium swartkop is my favourite.

I bought my first one as a cutting from an NGS garden visit. Very easy to propagate and now I have dozens. Just cut off about 8 inches (20cms) leave for the cut to “heal” and then push into a pot of gritty compost. About half of the stem needs to be in the pot.

They have very shallow roots but are very top heavy so I always put grit on top of the compost and use a clay pot where possible for extra weight.

Aeonium need to be in a greenhouse or in the house over winter, mine are fine in a bubble wrapped unheated greenhouse. They go outside from around end of May when all chance of frost has gone.

This year I got a surprise when I went to the greenhouse to see them, one was in flower! I had never seen this before, amazing!.

Tysoe Walled Kitchen Garden