Cheers To Rich R in the Lake District for sending us more great flower pictures from his locale (from just up the road above and his garden below). It looks like a great place where you are Rich! Wonderful stuff and good luck with your forthcoming horticultural project.
As we mentioned, the weather here has been odd but the combination of the sun and rain is making things grow like mad! The side bed up near the house (above) is getting off to a great pace with the assorted bulbs we got from Lldl breaking through and the sweet pea seedlings started off on the kitchen windowsill not being eaten by slugs.
Even the combined wild bed and vegetable patch (above) is looking a bit structured this year rather than the usual anarchic horticultural madness! We still are pondering what to do with the side of an old shed at the back. Any ideas?
As for the weather, someone once said to us “Wouldn’t it be great if it only rained at night and was sunny during the day. Us gardeners would be so happy”. If only life really was like that.
Big shout to our good radio friend across the pond Justin Patrick Moore on his first book published by South London’s Velocity Press just a couple of miles away from Weeds HQ in Rye Lane, Peckham.
The book is called The Radio Phonics Laboratory and as it says on Velocity Press’ website “explores the intersection of technology and creativity that shaped the sonic landscape of the 20th Century”. If you love Karlheinz Stockhausen, Daphne Oram, Delia Derbyshire, Robert Moog and the like, go and buy one from the Velocity website here.
By request of the author here’s a daft dream we had around the time said book went to print. We’ve no idea what relevance the dream has in the scheme of the universe and also what Freud would have said but we can only put it down to a couple of tabs of co-codamol before bedtime to stop toothache.
The dream was about a man who fixed vintage valve radio sets in an old factory in Coventry that also housed an exhibition about radio propagation, “Which is a very interesting subject” the man told us.
The factory was in a street off a back entry behind Cedars Avenue in Coventry where Delia Derbyshire was brought up. In the dream we imagined we woke up and were going to travel back to Coventry to find this non existent factory and the radio exhibition housed within it. Then we woke up!
It’s not much of an exciting “we won the lottery and now live on a luxury Richard Branson type island” dream and doesn’t make much sense, unlike the great book from Justin Patrick Moore. We promise we will never divulge our dreams again but the long and short of it is, if you love a bit of electronica, you’ll love this book!
That’s the mad thing with gardening, you’ve been waiting all winter for everything to start and before you know it, it’s nearly June and horticultural madness has ensued and you’ve a “to do” list as long as a garden hoe. There’s no magic day where everything just changes, it just happens and without you even seemingly noticing!
We’ve had some lovely days over the last couple of weeks with glorious sunshine and then overnight on Saturday came some heavyweight rain. Talk about the garden now being in a state of fecundity.
Oddly though we have a strawberry plant in a pot up near the house and been wondering why it hasn’t been doing anywhere as good as the others dotted around the garden especially with the current weather. We assume this could be the reason why (pic above).
A big thanks to Debby H for sending us pictures of her garden now everything’s starting to hot up in the growing stakes.
Above is the Iris which is now flowering with some rather colourful geraniums below it.
The peonies (above) are great, we’ve got one with a deep red/purple flower but we’re liking the ones in white! We can see some staking going on here, in our garden the bush tends to grow out a bit competing with other plants for space and then flops over a bit after the rain. That’s where the staking comes in handy. Loving those white blooms.
Above is the ceanothus bush which is going at great guns and we’ve just read the plant has nitrogen fixing properties. New thing to us!
And finally the zephyranthes flower which is “slightly battered” as Debby described it but it still looks great to us. Cheers again for the pictures Debby!
This Sunday 19th May 2024 at 0900/1300 hrs UTC on 6160 kHz and then at 2000 UTC on 6160 kHz and 3975 kHz Imaginary Stations bring you Skybird Radio International which will be beamed to Europe via Shortwave Gold.
SRI is a worldwide affair as you can imagine with tunes from around this globe of ours from DJ Frederick and Justin Patrick Moore. There’s also a mix from One Deck Pete which will include tracks by Marlena Shaw, Manjeet Kondal, Tubotito & Rags, Adrian Sherwood and Esher Suarez.
Gerry Hectic (also a contributor to our Countryfile style calendar 2025) has produced an answer version to the One Deck Pete mix and here it is in its glory and what a mix it is. Thank you Gerry, it’s appreciated.
Gerry Hectic presents “A May themed answer” mix
One Deck Pete & Popular – Enrico (Hay-eer-yah’s Continual Harmonica Cut) BCR
Loretta Heywood – Satta Massagana (The 6/* Blues Mix) – Tangential Music
Marlena Shaw – Love Has Gone Away (Disco Version) – Blue Note 12”
Sababa 5 – Bezani – Batov Records
Natasha Kitty Katt ft. His Bitter Truth – Galactic Love – F*CLR Music
Thank you to our good mate Gerry Hectic for a photograph from his garden and we’ve entitled it “Amorous Snails”. All we now need is 11 more photographs and we’ll be able to have our own Countryfile style calendar soon. Postage and packing will be definitely included and we’ll try and get John Craven to sign a few.
A big thanks goes out to our good friend in Kyiv, Wlad (US7IGN) for sending us some more great pictures. This time it’s his indoor grown potatoes, from harvest to serving!
We seem to forget that to garden you don’t actually have to have a physical garden and Wlad proves this point really well with this great little harvest of potatoes which they look tasty too! All served with a bit of tasty dill that he grew indoors too.
And Wlad has written a great book which we featured (here) a while ago called 
A big thanks to Debby H for sending us some pictures of what’s going on in the flower pots and flower beds in north London at the moment. “The picture (above) is of our begonias which are now flowering. They nearly died the winter before last as we put them on the bathroom windowsill. They didn’t like it at all. Probably not enough light. They spent all last summer sulking and doing very little. However, it seems that they have now forgiven us, and are rewarding us with flowers.” Brilliant, good luck with them!
Excellent stuff Debby! It looks like we’re well on the way now weatherwise!
We obtained our new flymo yesterday and after a quick cup of tea got to work starting on the overgrown lawn in the back. After a cut and a rake and a couple of repeats we got the lawn down to an acceptable level. We even included a wild triangle at the top. The flymo certainly got a baptism of fire yesterday, no hard feelings lawn mower.
Weeds up to me knees 