Heard on Tom Ravenscroft’s show this week, a tune from Deerhunter called Snakeskin out on 4AD (home to the US Girls we featured a while back here). Loving the instrumental section three quarters of the way in. The tune takes a little while to sink in, but it will! One to play loud while you realise it’s near enough autumn.
They must be firing chemicals into the atmosphere again (see post here for explanation) as it was lovely this morning, now the weather’s taken a turn for the worst.
Before it did rain I harvested the first of the (two so far) butternut squashes on one of the plants grown from seed. It might have the odd mark on it and a light slash down the side, but who cares!
It didn’t take much effort either, I sowed the seeds in May and popped a couple of them in each pot (of seed sowing compost) just in case only one germinated, as they were part of a job-lot of seed packets on e-bay where some had passed their “use by date” and pulled out the weaker of the two seedlings when they appeared. I waited until the first proper leaves appeared and put them in various parts of the garden after “hardening them off” first. Apart from weeding around the young seedlings and giving them a semi-regular feed of comfrey liquid (beware, it pongs a bit!) that was it. 
The plant that really took off was in one of the side beds which stalled for a couple of weeks then went absolutely mad, covering all the area and now trying to climb up the small plum tree and travel across the lawn. It’s an ideal plant if you’ve got a sunny corner or plot you want to cover for a season, just watch it though, as it will takeover!
The moral of this post is, butternut squash, it was easy, it was cheap (well cheap in fact!) GO AND DO IT (next year)!
It was sunny yesterday morning so I went out early in the back to tidy up the bottom bed, weeds were beginning to sprout there and bindweed was finding it’s way in too. I do like a bit of clearing and weeding as it also gives my headspace a chance of a clear-out too (man)!
Funnily enough I was going to “rest” that bed this year, but in February I obtained a great selection of stuff from the seed swap organised by Lewisham Gardens and Golightly Gardens (post here.) Then there was that bargain seed job-lot I won on ebay too (post here) and that’s apart from packets bought from the garden centre, so those seeds had to go somewhere!
It started with some poppies, then it was beetroots, carrots and a couple of salad crops. Then I added a couple of different varieties of sunflower, parsnips, rocket, cornflowers and not forgetting there were some strawberry plants in already. It looked like a garden designer’s nightmare (below pic: the plot in the summer). So much for a “resting” bed with nothing in it!
It’s like gardening itself though, once you start it’s difficult to stop. You go out for ten minute’s “tipping around with a hoe” and you return a few hours later after finding “another job I just had to do”.
One thing though, a row of leeks that I started off from seed (above, in the seed tray in the “found in the street” terrarium taken around late February) are just about ready if I wanted to use them small. How long do they take to grow?
Weeds up to me knees 