Category Archives: Bees

We’ll take you where the sun shines

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Cheers to Maz and Marc from sending us some great pictures from their recent holiday in France. These photos are from in and about Saint-Aubin-de-Cadelech, south of Bergerac.

Just like when you receive postcards a few days after people come back off their holidays, we are following the tradition here. It was very hot over there and one day reached to 43 degrees C in the shade, wow!

Some Mirabelle de Nancy plums that taste very very sweet (above) and some sumac (below).

And a smoketree (below) that we have just read, that is related to sumac.


Here’s a wonderful willow shelter and below is the shady view from inside (looking down to the treeline by the River Dropt), what a great idea!

Big thanks to Maz and Marc for these great pictures! Hope you both had a great holiday.

Pop don’t go the teasel

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The teasel is a very odd plant but we love the way the flower grows, very strange white mini flowers are now coming from the head. Odd but very interesting! We just hope they don’t take over the garden.

 

It’s just turned up in the garden

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There’s a tall old plant at the back of the bed that seems to have shot out of nowhere. We did a Plant.id on it and it turns out to be Fullers Teasel. It’s a plant that initially stuck out to us on a walk on the wildside (the river path from Sydenham to Catford) but not so sure we want it in that part of the garden.

We’ve just read up on it and it says it not that good for the plant to move it about, as it has a bit of a large taproot so perhaps we’ll leave it be. It’s good for the birds and bees anyway and the flower don’t look that bad. We are sure we either bought a plant last year or took some seed heads off a plant. Who knows, we just have to check on it that it don’t take over the garden.

Closer to home AKA fish food, courgettes and tomatoes

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Things are looking great in the garden, the late sown Courgette/Zucchini plants are flowering and here’s one of them with a little fruit showing on the left hand side (above). In the picture is also some sort of wild geranium/pelargonium that came out of a wild flower seed mix we flung around the area beside it.

There are a couple of fruits starting to ripen on the very early sown tomato (above) we put in a broken food recycling bin that is up near the house. And (below) an ebay purchase (of £11) of fish food for the goldfish in the pond (50p for size comparison). Reckon this’ll last until the end of the decade! Does fish food have a “use by” date? Another silly question put to you by Weeds up to me knees.

Have a good gardening week and “may the comfrey liquid, bees and weather by with you” as they say on GQT.

And solitaire’s the only game in town

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“Honey bees get all the headlines” so it says on this great bee hotel/bee Air B&B seen by Guys & St Thomas’ Hospital the other day.

We waited about in front of the accommodation for a few minutes waiting for some insect action but sadly didn’t see anything but it’s a great idea to have a bee hotel. When we got home we collected some hollow sticks and plant stalks and stuck them all in a nice pile at the back of the wild bit but it isn’t anything as smart as that one.

For more information on making a bee hotel/mansion/bungalow/two up two down and why it is important to have one take a look here.

Wild wild wild youth

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The wild bit at the bottom of the garden is starting to colour up a bit. We originally put in some seed bombs a few years back, things got a bit messy the season after and then we bought some various wild flower seed for shade and woodland and just bunged them in, in a anarchic gardening style. We’ll buy some more off ebay next week and see what it brings to the (plant) party. Any good ideas when it comes to wild plants for the shade?

There’s also a few mini ponds in between the plants made out of all things including large margarine containers and even an old slow cooker pot and they’re well disguised now but still good for wildlife. We think all gardens need a wild bit somewhere. If you look closely you can see the bucket that keeps the comfrey liquid a brewing in with an old bathroom tile as its lid near the compost bin. For God’s sake, don’t lift off that lid!

Can you take the weather forecasters to court?

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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.

Honey from down under

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Big shout to our good friend Paul Greenstein once of the East Dulwich parish, now of Melbourne, Australia (we’ve featured his garden a few times here, here and here) and also a Madtone musical collaborator as Audiovert.

If you remember, Paul keeps bees in his garden (above: a pic of his bees from a while ago) and he’s just recently had his first bumper crop of honey (below), extracting around 30 kilos and reckon they may be more as well. Great stuff Paul and thanks for letting us know about it, we imagine it’s very hard work but well worth it though.

With some of the honey he’s been making Mead (below), one with Seville orange, cloves, raisins and cinnamon and the other with Morello cherries. Sounds and looks tasty! We tried making Mead once with honey procured from a stall at Leather Lane market. The recipe said it will either taste heavenly or like battery acid. Ours tasted like the latter, we never made it again!

Paul makes some great tunes under the name Audiovert including this Madtone collab African Bass and his contribution to the Shortwave Transmissions project here. Thanks for getting in touch Paul!

Pets Win Prizes

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Here is the audio for KPET which went out on Shortwave Gold on Sunday 8th October 2023. Have a liston to a great show that has lots of pet related tunes and dedications going out to collie dogs, guinea pigs and budgies owners.

Beginning the show at 00.00 is a 15 minutes mix called “A tribute to Fido, Twinkie and Sheba” from One Deck Pet(e) and here’s the tracks:
oofoe – goldfish
Naslah – Cats & dogs
Cat Stevens – Was dog a donut
Benhayyi Al Baghbaghan – Salute the parrot (excerpt)
Soothsayers/Victor Rice – Glass fish dub

So fill up the dog bowl, put the cover over the parrot cage and enjoy the show!