A big shout out to our good friends across the pond Dr Strangedub and DJ Baby Swiss of the excellent radio show The Echo Chamber on KFAI. As we’ve said before, if you want to hear reggae, dub, downbeat and beyond, tune in from 8 – 12 UK time on a Wednesday morning here for a cracking good show. At around 37 minutes into the 24th of July show you’ll hear Madtone‘s “Who’d be a pirate” just before a lovely garden related tune from Sister Julie called Garden Binghi.
Have a listen to the whole show here as it’s wonderful stuff! Thanks again the good Doctor!
The other day we walked up by the Brockley Best Hand Car Wash and saw an excellent example of guerrilla gardening in action that even the great Gansta Gardener Ron Finley would be proud of.
We’ve walked past there a fair few times before but never noticed any gardening going on. Whether it’s the actual car cleaners themselves or someone utilising the triangular space of land on the corner of the forecourt there’s a load of tomato plants that are looking well loved and healthy. Someone’s giving them a good watering and feed by the look of it and it was a nice suprise to the eyes!
Across the road from there is something else we never noticed before even though we’ve been told about it a couple of times (cheers Steve). Lorenzo’s Records has been in the locality for 3 years and it’s a great record shop. Sadly we didn’t stay long but we’ll be visiting again. Narmy from there told us about the excellent LP from Mort Garson (below) when we mentioned Weeds up to me knees and how it was about gardening as well as music. We’d forgotten that Justin Patrick Moore of the excellent Radio Phonics Laboratorybook mentioned this to us a while back here after we recognised the LP sleeve. What with it being so Weeds related we thought we’d post it again. Great recommendation Narmy!
We bought a handful of singles from the shop including this one that we’ve never heard before from Ezz Reco And The Launchers With Boysie Grant called King Of Kings. There’s some crazy lion noises at the start and towards the end which adds to the tune. On first listen we thought it was some of strange warp on the vinyl.
You think you know the area you live in and it’s great to know that there are still hidden (music and gardening) treasures that can take you by suprise.
On Sunday 4th August 2024 at 0900/1300 hrs UTC on 6160 kHz and then at 2000 UTC on 6160 kHz and 3975 kHzImaginary Stations have another version of COOL, this time COOL 4 via Shortwave Gold. Like the last COOL shows it’s all about those summertime tunes, 1950’s sun tan lotion adverts, deckchairs, long drinks and cool nights. If you’ve loved the last few summer shows you’ll love this one. Shortwave on, sunscreen on and tune into COOL.
A big hi to Rich R up in the Lake District for sending us this great picture yesterday. As he said “Saw this weirdness in the sky this evening. I wonder if such a phenomenon has a name?” We have no idea what it can be, anyone out there in Weeds land can tell us what it actually is? It really looks great and we have never seen anything like this before.
Is it someone messing around with a mirror or a ship of extraterrestrials landing from 60B, Who knows? Talking of the great planet 60B (the second planet from the sun Kruger if you have forgotten) here is for the millionth time is our favourite ever clip from youtube. You can’t get any better than this.
Big shout to Jon at Coughing Pigeon on Brum Radio which is one hell of an eclectic show and well worth listening to if you like a bit of mix up from some acoustic chilledness, reggae, dub and all sorts. Thanks to Jon for playing a rough mix of Madtone‘s “Who’d be a pirate?” at 11.04 on the recent show of 19th July 2024 (below).
Cheers to Debby H for sending us some great pictures of her garden again. We’re loving the ornithogalum which has just started to flower. As she said “Hopefully this is the first of several” and we hope so too!
“The golden rod is amazing. It’s about 6 foot tall. The flowers are nearly ready now.” They are looking good. She’s been away in France for a few weeks and is just managing to get on top of the weeding. That’s it what with the weather we’ve been having, rain then sun, sun then rain. The weeds love that sort of weather they really do. “The slugs got all my rudbeckia that I planted out just before we left, the dahlia disappeared too.” Those slugs eh?
“On the other hand, the cosmos are doing well. The flowers seem larger than last year, perhaps it’s all the rain!” The cosmos do look nice, they’re an attractive flower. We’ve only grown the annual version a few years ago and they came up great and then we forgot to sow them the year after. Sadly they didn’t self seed.
“We planted phlox last spring. It didn’t do much last year but it’s starting to flower now.”
All things in garden are sadly not all rosey as the pear tree (above) is not very happy though and there doesn’t look like there’s any fruit coming on it this year sadly. As well as little black eggs on the tree, which she’s sprayed a few times, she also had to treat it for rust. We wonder what is up with the pear? The strawberry patch looks very healthy though!
Thanks again Debby and do keep sending us these updates as the garden is looking great.
This came up in our youtube feed just and we’d forgotten how good it is. We love it even more as we imagine that the blokes in the band are standing on a platform at the Elephant & Castle railway station with the old London College of Printing building at the back of them. This is such a good tune! £25 on discogs and worth it, we reckon! Love a 12″ with an extended mix and a dub version too.
Thanks to Rich R in the Lake District for sending us a pic of a woolly intruder in his back garden the other day. We like the look on the sheep’s face who could be thinking “What is this human doing in MY field?”
One advantage is there’s a good chance that may be some sheep droppings left which could be a pain in the neck but looking online it looks like they’re high in both phosphorus and potassium which is great for the garden. Just like the classic horse manure it has to have time to age (as it’s far too strong and if used straight away would burn the plants) and you can even make a compost tea out of it to apply to the garden in liquid form. We’d suggest a thick pair of gloves if you intend to pick some up this weekend. Cheers for that Rich! More on sheep manure here.
On our travels today we popped into Peckham Rye Park and discovered the community wildlife garden there that we never even knew about, even though we’ve visited the park a many few times.
We loved the info sign on the way in which has in the top right hand corner, a picture with the caption “Gardeners in the greenhouses in the 1960’s”. A couple of younger blokes are around an older chap (the foreman?) wearing a hat, jacket and tie in a Cyril Fletcher (That’s Life and ATV gardener) stylee. I mean we all want to be stylish in the garden but we do think the older guy would have racked up a few bob in dry cleaning bills if he was in that attire say working around the pond or digging a load of Pyracantha out of some flower beds. Saying that he looked very smart indeed though and so does the wildlife garden.
The chap reminds us when we worked at Westminster City Council and one of the park attendants (AKA “Mr Clean”) used to use the cleanliness of his work clothing as an excuse not to work. He used to wear a (spotless) brown council park keeper’s suit all of the time and we don’t think we had ever seen him in overalls (that every park keeper was given on their first day). Perhaps he’d conveniently left it on the bus on his first day. Who knows but he did get out of doing quite a lot of work using that excuse.
Any stylish gardening clothing tips from out there in the Weeds gardening universe?
After all the comments about how bad this summer has been, it looks as the weather has listened and now changing to some super warmth over the next few days and to celebrate here’s a lovely tune from Augustus Pablo/Enos McCloud.
“On the other hand, the 
Weeds up to me knees 