Tysoe Walled Kitchen Garden: April 2023

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.

Friday, April 21, 2023

March and April

Where did that time go, is it really almost May?

The weather is still wet and cold. It was only 1 degree at night on the 19th April, and that was in the greenhouse! No wonder we are having trouble getting some of the seeds to germinate even with a heated bench. Just to confuse further, it was 17 degrees outside the next day.

There is one area of the garden which looks lovely now and that is the bottom of the lawn in the front garden. When we moved here nearly 15 years ago there were a few cowslips on the lawn at the end. We decided to leave them and over the years we have added various spring plants and bulbs to enhance the area.

The cowslips are opening by the end of March. There have been snowdrops, anemone blanda, snakes head fritillary and crocus. The tall spikes of camissia are up now and the flowers will open in May.

Then will come the yellow rattle which has established now and controls the grass.

We leave the area to flower and then go to seed, eventually strimming at the end of August/early September and then mow for the rest of the season.

Mid April, a golden sea at the end of the garden.

Tysoe Walled Kitchen Garden