Tysoe Walled Kitchen Garden: December

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 21, 2024

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 dense in the tops of the trees and too high for us to remove. So earlier this year we had a tree surgeon come and remove all the mistletoe that was growing above a height that we could safely collect from our ladders.

There was still plenty left that we could pick.

Each year we harvest some of this and sell it to raise money to give to our chosen charities.

2024 has been a good year for our mistletoe, lovely big berries and we have raised £140 from the mistletoe so a great boost to our charity donations in January.

I always make my own wreath for the front door, using all materials from the garden.

Here is the 2024 wreath.

This year I used a willow base which I made in a willow weaving workshop the other year.

From the garden I collected; holly, ivy, mistletoe, rose hips, yew, spotted laurel, rosemary, Phlomis seed heads and sedum seed heads. Can you spot them all?

It is the beginning of the snowdrop season now, the first early one I have is Mrs McNamara, she is up and flowering now, will last for many weeks and gradually all the others I have will start to appear.

A great sign of 2025 coming.

Tysoe Walled Kitchen Garden