Category Archives: Dub Gardeners of the world unite

We love shortwave!

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Below is the studio version of this morning’s Imaginary Station’s WWLS – We Love Shortwave transmission from Radio Miami International featuring tunes and mixes from DJ Frederick, Justin Patrick Moore and Kit, G5KIT. If you love shortwave you’ll love WWLS!

At 22.45 there’s a mix from One Deck Pete called We love Shortwave. Here’s the tracklistings:

Radio Sweden Interval Signal
Triptica – Mysterious Radio Signals
Jasmine Tutum & Madtone – This Frequency
Shortwave Sounds – Reflections
Madtone – Spoken Words from Ibiza
Holger Czukay/Jah Wobble – Hiss n Listen
Gregory Morris & The 18th Parallel – Dub In Your Stereo (dub of Message in your radio by Kumar)

We’ve got those Car Boot blues

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We recently attended a car boot at a South London car park at 6.45 am early doors, after gaining special “VIP Early Bird Dealer only access”, which basically meant handing six quid cash to a bloke on the gate while he chatted with a school boy on a pushbike.

One of the sellers was a vendor who looked like something out of Only Fools and Horses, battered Crombie, pork pie hat, two dinner plate sized badges and trousers hitched up a little too much showing some shin. He was pitched up next to an angry Millwall looking bloke selling large packs of bin bags and knock off perfume.

On the Crombie guy’s stall sat a Hohner Melodica. “Thirty quid,” he chirped. “Sixties original mate. It’s a beauty but the case is a bit bxggxred” Charming!

A “serious” muso type (so we thought) stepped up. He handled the instrument like he knew it inside out. “Mind if I play it?” he asked. “No bother, son,” came the reply from Del Boy.

We hesitated, bracing ourselves for some Augustus Pablo-style dub business. He took a breath, pursed his lips, looked around as if he was playing to a large crowd and proceeded to give a very bad short rendition of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” Even the Millwall guy selling the bin bags put his eyes up to heaven. It certainly weren’t Pablo…

Good luck to all for some great weather tomorrow for a spot of Sunday gardening!

A little whistling bird told me so

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Cheers to Spike from Morschen43 for sharing more photos of his garden in Le Puy-en-Velay, France. He was trying to take a pic of his apple tree and didn’t seen the blackbird on it that just didn’t move, so giving him a super picture and whistled a great tune as well!

Here’s some assorted photographs of the plum tree and some blossom around the garden. Spike certainly has a great looking garden and home!

And thanks to Spike, we heard this tune on his last Vampirefreaks radio show. It’s from Sidarsen and called Des Millards (from 4.51 mins in). It’s 18 mins long but it really is a bit of a hypnotising /strange one.

Here’s what Spike’s weekly radio show is all about: “Vampirefreaks is a show primarily focused on rock/punk but also covering the world of reggae, ska, dub, metal, hard rock, and sometimes hip-hop.” So if you love that stuff, tune in!

Cheers again to Spike for playing this tune as we’ve never heard of this before and for keeping up to date on the gardening tip. Keep those pictures and reports coming Spike!

Jumps and scratches free with every mix!

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Here’s a brand new (old) mix from One Deck Pete with tunes obtained from car parks in this big city of ours, out of various boxes, vinyl strewn over blankets from stalls next to “geezers” selling fake perfume and bin bags. No returns please and cash only, Okay?

Here’s the tracklistings:
Bob Marley – Mr Chatterbox
Willie Lindo – Midnight
Bob Andy – You don’t know
The Revolutionaries – MPLA + Version
I Roy – Cow Town Skank
Augustus Pablo – Cow Town Version
John Holt – Stranger in love
The Tennors – Pressure and slide
John Holt – Moving Away
The Revolutionaries – Revolution dub

 

It all seems to have started up north

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A big thanks to Debby H. for sharing an update from her north London garden! While we sowed ours directly outside this year and are still waiting for them to pop up, Debby’s cosmos are already starting to flower even though the plants are still small (see her photos above).

It’s great to see that her seed potatoes are finally breaking through. There’s some really healthy growth on them already.

Elsewhere in the garden, the rhododendron is also blooming beautifully.

As she mentioned “The bluebells are still lovely, although unfortunately not the native ones” (above).

The garden is looking great at this time of year as well, what’s it going to look like later this year? We can’t wait to find out, keeping sending us the updates Debby!

Gardening all over the world (as Status Quo may have sang)

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Thanks to our Downbeat on Shortwave collaborator and gardening friend Jesse Yuen who was out and about in his garden in Perth last weekend and sent us some pictures. (Top Picture) “It’s about 4.30pm in the afternoon, but there’s beautiful light because there’s a bush fire burning somewhere, so the smoke is giving everything a bit of a golden hue.”

He’s just acquired a new plant, a yellow flowering kangaroo paw. “I salvaged them from a house down the road about to be knocked down as I was on my way to DJ at a bush doof. I’ve been keeping it alive in a pot in the backyard until the weather cooled down and I had a chance to plant it.” That’s a find! More on the plant here.

He also got himself a eucalyptus macrocarpa for his garden. As he told us “This one is an absolute beauty. We’ve been on the waiting list at our local nursery for about six months, but some people wait for over two years. It’s a native, but it’s rare to buy it at a nursery. Check out pictures of it in an adult form to see how it gets.” See pic below, blimmin ‘eck!

And related to the kangaroo paw, here’s some pictures of the bush doof Jesse was DJing at and it looks a looks a great one!

He also said, “I’m gardening to the sounds of the preview of an amazing sounding downtempo album by local Australian artist Freda” and here’s a track from it.

 

Cheers for keeping us updated Jesse and the garden (and the bush rdoof) looks great!

It only takes a minute

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Reading the latest article on SWLing Post here about BBC interval signals, it reminded us of the wonderfully simple and direct “B–B–C” in the tonic scale used on shortwave for the BBC World Service and other transmissions to Africa.

We’ve always loved it and recently used it in a one-minute slightly odd piece from Madtone called “It Is AI, but we created it” for the 60 Sec Radio 2026 contest here, where “anything is possible as long as it’s 60 seconds long.”

The piece is below and features the said BBC interval signal alongside an excerpt of an strange ham radio conversation on 2 metres about AI generated music. We’re not that keen on AI generated music here funnily enough.

The contest is still open, so if you have 60 seconds radio collage, send it to the website here.

Before Dave came

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Yesterday was a lovely day. We started on the garden early, around 7:30am, when it was still grey and a little cold but as the hours passed, the weather gradually improved. After lunch, the grass was cut and looked great in the sunshine. The top right-hand corner of the lawn is the “wild area,” a tribute to a cat who passed away last year and loved to sleep there among the longer grass. Now the cat has gone, a fox has been kipping there on and off.

The side bed towards the bottom of the garden was cleared, and in place of the weeds, wildflower seeds were sown. It’s still cold, so whether they’ll thrive remains to be seen as it’s a bit of frost pocket down there. We were also told by a neighbour a few doors down that an underground stream runs through the gardens around that area. Whether that is true or not we’re not sure, but the soil is a bit on the boggy side around there.

Talking of seeds, one of our favourites plants has to be Night Scented Stock (above). While they may not be the most visually striking of plants, their fragrance more than makes up for it, especially on warm summer evenings when placed by an open back door.

Something we picked up last year as a single plant from Herne Hill Market was Brunnera macrophylla ‘Jack Frost’. It’s now doing well and starting to spread nicely at the bottom of the garden by the pond. It gets semi-shade there, along with a daily watering (without overdoing it), and it seems to love the spot. We’ve since added a couple more plants from eBay. They’re still quite small, but we’re sure it won’t be long before they begin to spread too.

Happy Easter weekend (gardening) everyone!

Continuing the Dave theme:

Northern beaches and birds

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Many thanks to Rich in the Lake District for sharing a couple of photos he took from his recent break in South West Scotland, where he visited Gatehouse of Fleet, Portpatrick, and the South Ayrshire coast. As he put it, “Spectacular, but cold.”

Above is a great picture of Ross Bay, while below is an ace shot of a red kite in flight, showing its distinctive long, deeply forked tail (we have just read about the tail so didn’t have a clue about it before). More information about the red kite here.

And we don’t know nothing, and we don’t really care

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We just heard on the Craig Charles show Nobody but you by Clarence Reid from 1969 and were shellshocked by the intro. We just didn’t know! Have a listen…

We remember a good while ago spotting this intro from James & Bobby Purify from I’m your puppet which is adapted on the excellent I am the toughest from Peter Tosh. We heard both songs a good few times and just didn’t make the connection.

That’s what we love about Reggae, you think you know a little about the genre and you know next to nada. We are always prepared to be educated and suprised, a bit like gardening!