Category Archives: Dub Gardeners of the world unite

Dub gardeners of the world unite yet again

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Yesterday morning on Radio 4 was a lovely dubwise treat thanks to Don Letts with Dub Revolution: The Story of King Tubby (available on listen again here) a celebration of the dub organiser himself. Worth a listen if you love the world of dub like we do here.

And talking of the rebel dread you may remember that in 2013 that Don said about Weeds: “A Dub/Punk/Gardening blog….now’s there’s a combination I can relate to! Actually tailor made for The Don…..check my yard bredrin’….” and sent some pictures (one below) of his garden which we loved! More pictures of his garden here.

And by chance yesterday we found a link of Don and his wife Grace’s garden on Gardeners’ World which originally went out last year. Have a good butchers at the garden from 6.40 minutes in here. As Don himself says, it’s a real mix of styles! #dubgardenersoftheworldunite

Dub gardeners of the world unite

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A big shout to Jesse Yuen who presents the excellent RTM.FM show North of the River Swan that specialises in downtempo dub and low end business on the second Sunday of the month from 4-6pm. Thanks to Jesse for sending us some pics (Thanks to Dee for taking them) of his great looking indoor planting scheme. The space is so bright and alive!

There’s a good variety of plants here even though us at Weeds are not the best when it comes to looking after plants of the indoor variety (we tend to overwater them then forget about them we’re ashamed to say.) There’s all sorts here including Kentia Palm, Chinese money plant (sometimes known as the UFO plant!), Prayer Plant, Tropic Snow, Mother-in-law’s Tongue, Devils Ivy, Parlour Palm, Umbrella Tree, Yucca, Mistletoe cactus (that looks well interesting) and the well hardy Spider Plant. (By the way whilst we’re on the subject of houseplants we have to mention a podcast to start following if you love gardening of the great indoors. It’s Jane Perrone‘s On the Ledge available here.)

And Jesse sent some of his favourite tunes from the North of the River Swan record boxes below to get stuck into. We didn’t know a lot of this stuff and that is what’s good about this music lark, once you open up that can of worms it’s never ending. There’s a ton of excellent tunes played on the show too so peruse the show’s mixcloud site here.

And do listen to the last episode of the show from 2020 featuring Jesse and Dubplate Pearl as it’s excellent stuff and full of some cracking tunes! Includes Prince Fari, Yabby You, Tradition, the great Depthcharge from Keith Hudson (What a tune!), a dub of Play fool get wise by Johnny Clarke and lots more great music.

Thanks again Jesse for sending the pics and the tunes!

Pigeons have a voracious appetite for brassicas

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A big shout to Jon and George of the excellent Coughing Pigeon Radio Show on Brum Radio that plays “Not just sounds from across THE spectrum, but sounds from across EVERY spectrum” as the Brum Radio website desribes the show and they’re not wrong there!

On last week’s show they played at 19 minutes in Jazz’min & Madtone’s “Return to the branches” and at 42 minutes Stefanosis with Remembering Augustus off the great FREE Echo Chamber – Around the World in Dub Volume 11/12 on Dan Dada Records available here. Cheers Jon for plugging the compilation! Give Coughing Pigeon a listen if you’re looking for a great cross-genre listening experience!

Photosynthesis in dub

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We’re just researching a gardening related mix and just came across a collective called Plants Dub “a project of inter-species music that inquire the communicative transfer between the human being and the plants”. Now you’re talking!

We’re going to dig deeper (no gardening pun intended) and do some finding out. Here’s one to start with “Phoenix carariensis” which is the Canary Island date palm. Who says gardening and music don’t mix?

And just to press home the point here’s a mix from the good Dr Strangedub from the excellent Echo Chamber on KFAI from a good few years ago. Well worth a listen.
Dub gardeners of the world unite!

Still life (with worms attached)

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And the heat in there is impressive too! Look at the build up of brandling worms at the bottom. We’ve just seen on the web you can buy them, 100 for £11! All we did is put a wet piece of cardboard down the bottom of the garden. Two days later, worms! Thanks to the great Bob Flowerdew for that! #theuniverseinthecompostbin

Dahlias during the day, Perseids later on tonight

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Big shout to our good mate Marc B for passing on a tuber of this lovely dahlia earlier this year. Look at it now! Ok it’s a bit thirsty looking and is a bit droopy but don’t we all feel like that when the temperature’s as mad as this?

Remember it’s the peak of a meteor shower tonight (or thereabouts.) So if you’re thinking of sitting out the back later on (it’s far too hot to sit in or even for trying to get to sleep!) have a look at this site here (and their twitter account here) it’s “Dead good” as they say. We’ve had many a happy evening looking at their twitter feed, looking up at the night sky, looking at their twitter feed, looking up at the night sky (Ad infinitum).

How’s life in London?

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It’s sweltering and it’s not even 12 noon yet! We’ve got KFAI on and tuned into the Echo Chamber and listening to the last few tunes of the programme played by DJ Baby Swiss AKA CAPNCOZY (who co-hosts with the one and only Dr Strangedub) and this one by Kliment & Tuatara called Super Moon was just played. Perfect for weather like this!

A garden update and a tune

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Thanks to our good friend across the pond Justin Patrick Moore for the sending us a photo update of his back garden. That’s what’s brilliant around this time of year, the garden seems to grow overnight and at a fair rate too. We all should really appreciate this time as autumn will be here before we know it. Above are the “Tiger Lilies gone wild” and below is entitled “When the Compost Takes on a Life of it’s Own” and we all know about that when we get those potato peelings and old onions sprouting! Is that a cucumber/courgette growing and are there a few mushrooms in there too?

And below a nice patch of borage that the bees love and the leaves are a good addition to comfrey if you’re making a liquid feed.

He also sent us a nice tune to accompany the pics from Anna Nacher & Marek Styczyński off the LP entitled Throbbing Plants (the title sounding very Genesis Breyer P-Orridge meets Percy Thrower.)

Thank you for the pics Justin. Please send your garden pics, no matter how small your garden is, even if it’s just a couple of pots on a windowsill, send them in! The address is onedeckpete (at) gmail.com we’d love to see your garden!

And just in from our Cincinnati correspondent…

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And this week’s guest garden pics are from our good friend Justin Patrick Moore in Cincinnati and it’s a garden that has a really nice feel to it! All text below from Justin and click here for a recent great piece on Delia Derbyshire from his blog sothismedias.com
The mugwort (below) is planted on the side of the house. I try to harvest some every year around the summer solstice to make smudge sticks with. It’s good on its own, or mixed with sage & lavender in a smudge. It grows real tall and gets kind of wild. Lily of the Valley has taken over the bottom area next to old muggy, and has spread there on its own, fast, from the patch of Lily we have in the front. Blackberry bushes on the fence are also making forays into this area. Our cat Flynn is chilling on the cellar doors.
I bought a mushroom growing kit back in April and gave it a go. I thought, after a few weeks, it didn’t work or I messed it up, so threw it on the compost (below). Now there are a few small oyster mushrooms growing in the compost. Not a bad spot for them really! Some things take longer to sprout than others.
We had a concrete patio put in last year and we’ve had some nice gatherings on it so far. Looking forward to when we can invite the friends, family, cousins and extended kin, blood or otherwise, back to the house and have a proper grill out and pot luck.
We moved the houseplants out and back inside three different times this past spring (below). Except the really big heavy ones I have to use a two-wheeler to get out, because really I’m only going to move those in the spring and the fall. I guess we really should have until the real last frost because they took a beating with repeated cold snaps, thunderstorms and then hot days. That’s Cincinnati weather for you. Wait a few minutes and it will change.
Our veg patch (main picture at the top) also took a beating. I may use some old windows we have to keep the seedlings warmer next year. Most of them didn’t really stick, so we ended up buying starter plants of lettuce, tomatoes, & jalapeno and putting those in, and my wife just got some thai basil and put that in. Our daughter had a bunch of romanesco they had started and she gave us a few to put in. And begged us to take more. That’s a new one for us (We at Weeds haven’t grown them either.)
On the other hand some seed we planted a few years back finally sprang up. We’ve been attempting to get a wildflower patch going around the birdfeeders, because it gets pretty messy around there anyway. Last year a bunch of sunflowers came up from the seed the birds left behind. We also had some borage and other stuff in there. But this year the foxglove seeds we put down -well, at least one- finally came up and made an appearance (above).
The Frankenstein t-shirt on the line I got on a field trip to a place up in Dayton, Ohio, an old surplus store that is going out of business in September. Mendelsons is the first place to look for every last thing, and it has a special place in the hearts of many local electronics and radio hobbyists because of the rows and rows and rows and rows of electronics they have there. “Mendelsons was established in 1960 by the late Harry Mendelson. With over 1 million square feet of warehouse space and inside loading dock facilities, Mendelson’s handles surplus & liquidation inventory from one box to 50 truckloads.” Besides the capacitors I picked up, I also picked up the Frankenstein shirt, because, well… he lives on electricity too. It was great trip with Robert K4PKM and Howard KD8WOY, which we dubbed the “Fellowship of the Fritter” because of the apple fritters I bought at the bakery before heading up to Dayton.
Brilliant stuff Justin, we love the garden here and Mendelsons looks a brilliant shop, it’s a shame it’s closing! And here’s a very chilled tune as chosen by Justin.

We wanna be free to do what we wanna do

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DJ Frederick’s Free Radio Skybird returns to the shortwaves on Sunday August 4th 2019 via http://www.channel292.de/ on 6070 kHz at 1900 UTC (8pm UK time).

With a mixture of features and music, the hour transmission will include One Deck Pete’s “Soul on shortwave” and Justin Patrick Moore from Sothismedias with the first episode of the Radiophonic Laboratory. Pencil it in on your WH Smith wallplanner! #freeradioskybird