A slice of moody electronica for this also moody (and cloudy) Saturday morning in London. One to have on loud while trying to decide whether you should get out there and start weeding or have a cup of tea and go back to bed.
A big thanks to the good Doctor Strangedub for putting us in touch with another dub gardener Phil Harmony who presents the excellent Dubnight Radio Show from Berlin (listen to the latest episode of the show here.) Phil grows a wide selection of stuff on his balcony including tomatoes, peppers, raspberries, strawberries and the hot as hot, ghost chilli (nagaia jolokia.) More to come about Phil’s balcony soon.
Phil also mentioned to me about the Prince Valley Guest House in the Blue Mountains in Jamaica who grow their own coffee, and last night looking on their Facebook page was this picture of probably the maddest plant I’ve ever seen. It’s the Jade Vine, a member of the pea and bean family so it’s related to the humble kidney bean down the allotment, how good is that, and the bats love them too. Ah, I’ve just read it’s not frost tolerant, so it’ll won’t be much good in my back garden then! From one great Jade to another…
Black Jade – Drum Fashion – Jade (off the excellent “Contempo” LP)
Horace Andy – Rain from the sky
The Aggrovators – It’s raining dub
I think these two tunes will give you some idea to what the weather’s been like in London today.
This morning I had a look at the excellent vertical veg website (run by Mark Ridsdill Smith who picked out that corker of a tune from Bessie Banks on The Dirt the other week) and found some great tips for growing tomatoes. I’ve a few plants in the ground, one in a well overcrowded hanging basket (plonked inside another hanging basket, novel eh?) and others in reused ready-mix cement buckets up near the house.
I’ve staked them up with bamboo canes, give them a regular water, a weekly feed and take off any sideshoots so all the plants energy goes into making the fruit. When the plant has formed about 4 or 5 trusses I nip out the top except the hanging basket one which I’ll leave. Most have been raised from seed except the ones kindly given to us from Dig This Nursery, who will be having their annual tomato festival on the 9th of August and know a thing or two about toms!
On vertical veg, Mark speaks to a guy called Nick Chenhall who runs the website Tomato Growing about growing the ‘umble tom in growbags and containers. Some brilliant tips on the video (see it here) like feeding them little and often (dilute the feed more than you usually would) and one mad one I’ve never heard before, adding a cup of used washing up water to your watering can once every couple of weeks which acts as a wetting agent, and helps bring back moisture to areas that have dried out.
Even better, at the end of the video the guy from Tomato Growing is seen serenading the toms in his polytunnel with a classical guitar. It’s that old music/gardening connection again, brilliant! Me, I will be playing mine some happy hardcore and see if that gets results!
Temples – Move with the Season (Beyond the Wizzards Sleeve remix) – Heavenly
It’s been a lovely day today so there’s been a bit of flymo-ing, weeding, sowing root veg of the beetroot and carrot variety and this evening, big action with the garden hose, all the while wondering if all those tales about watering in sunshine are true.
Then this evening it starts to chuck it down. Brilliant, as usual I am bang on with my timing. To accompany this tale of gardening woe here’s some mad Eroll Alkan/Richard Norris business on a well trippy tip and if it weren’t so blimmin warm I’d get me kaftan on. But then again if I did, I wouldn’t be able to give it large to the tune below.
Thanks to our good mate Will J for passing this mad tune on. Is that the sound of bagpipes? And I do love the punk rock style ending!
A great tune from Jamie XX heard on Rob Da Bank this week, lovely steel pans and old school “rave’s not dead” samples. A chilled (dark) affair, one to play at low volume while trying to water the garden clandestinely at 10.30pm with a garden hose fitted with a silencer to avoid any (sudden) hosepipe bans or any annoyance to the neighbours. Love the “Fila, Head, Kappa…” sample at the end! We got the dance with the new stylee..
I’ve just spent an hour between showers weeding the veg bed at the end of the garden, it’s ideal for lettuces, spinach etc as it doesn’t get full sun all day so they tend not to “bolt” (go to seed quickly). Apart from the lettuce and spinach, there’s a couple of cabbages, climbing french beans, one purple sprouting broccoli, early spuds (that are nearly ready to dig up) beetroot and a pink tree stump (don’t ask!) Also in shot, a couple of dalek compost bins procured off the council, a wheelbarrow which was left out on a local street with a note saying “take me” on it, the wormery (the white bucket) and the comfrey liquid fermenting in a bucket with a council garden waste bag on top filtering out the toxic gasses.
At the same time down the road the local church fete was in progress. I knew it was on because earlier I popped to the shops and saw local firefighters decked out in face paint (imagine them turning out like that to a shout!) showing kids around their appliance and a bouncy castle was in full swing. While I was tending to the veg patch a RnB band started up with the amps cranked up really high (much to the disgust of the neighbours). They banged out “Route 66,” “Johnny B Goode” and a cover of The Subways “Be my Rock n Roll Queen” with lots of added shouts, iggy pop-isms and yelps which made me laugh while I pulled out weeds and filled in the gaps with more sowings. Mid-set the lead singer read out the results to the Tombola (“The star prize of £200 goes to…”) and then into a another rocking version of “Johnny B Goode”. Brilliant! What do you reckon the vicar thinks to all this rock n roll behaviour? “Jolly good” I hope is her reply.
Notis & Iba Mahr – Diamond Sox Movie
One for a Saturday evening, the excellent promo movie for Notis & Iba Mahr’s new single Diamond Sox which even has a little bit of gardening interest in it (leaves being raked up, a never ending task come the autumn when I worked for the council!)
It’s a tune celebrating old time fashion wear featuring the great Max Romeo in a cameo role. Big shout to David Rodigan for tipping us off about this one on his show the other week. Some lovely suede boot (a nice pair of Clarks by the way) cleaning techniques on show here (in an old school toothbrush style, brushing over a boiling kettle with a hard wire brush works wonders too!)
In the video above there’s a scene from a pub called The Enterprise which I’m convinced was the one in Camberwell where in the 1980’s I had my first “sunday afternoon stop back” to a soundtrack of old reggae, classic soul and clinking beer glasses plus a free plate of chicken, rice and peas from the generous landlord Louis when everyone else was going home to their sunday roast. In the good old days London pubs used to close at 2.30 then reopen at 7, bonkers!
Talking of which, the weather’s also been bonkers today, while I’m writing this, it’s tipping it down with added thunder and lightning. Yet at just gone 9 this morning the sun was blazing, so a bit of early “tipping about” was in order so I tidied up the beds down the left hand side of the garden. This can you believe was once where a couple of greenhouses stood before one of the previous owners smashed them up. Criminal isn’t it? I’d love a greenhouse (with heating, hi-fi and disco lighting of course!)
The beds nearest the house contain peas, one solitary cabbage, onions, rhubarb, parsnips, beetroot and carrots. There’s not much rhyme or reason to the beds, (I mean just one solitary cabbage!) some rows go north to south and some go east to west. The raised bed to the side of them (made from a couple of scaffolding boards found in a skip) contain runner beans and raspberries (I was given a bag of roots with shoots that a friend of mine was going to chuck out when he was thinning out his raspberry patch on his allotment.) The bed furthest away has a dwarf plum tree, three tomato plants, a couple of courgettes, a pumpkin which is now starting to wander, some borage for the bees to the side and a couple of houseplants that are having a “summer break” in the terrarium/fishbowl thing in the middle. Pick and mix jazz-gardening or what?
Talking of tomatoes, I heard a great tip on last week’s episode of The Dirt, don’t forget to give your tomato flowers a light shake to help the pollen on it’s way. Good eh?
Big shout to our good friends Dr Strangedub and DJ Baby Swiss for the rebroadcast of “In The Garden Of Dub” part 1 of a mix for all dub gardeners, on this week’s Echo Chamber on KFAI. Before the mix is a rerub of my appearance on The Dirt the other week. Cheers for airing that!
Also on the show there’s some great new music from Phil Harmony, Nate Wize, Alpha Steppa, and more… Download it here.
Download the updated “In The Garden Of Dub Part 1 & Part 2” (dedicated to the late Peter Sellers aka Chauncey Gardner) here:
Weeds up to me knees 