And just in from our Cincinnati correspondent…

Posted on May 31, 2020 by onedeckpete

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.

A mountain garden from across the pond

Posted on May 2, 2020 by onedeckpete

You know we love seeing other people’s gardens and a friend of ours Thomas sent in some great pictures of his space atop a mountain in western North Carolina, USA and we love it!

His vegetable beds are at an early stage of growth he told us but they still look impressive, we love those logs! “We’re still not beyond our last frost date, so the veggie garden is still very young. Indeed, we even had a few snow flakes last night.” Being up in the mountains the garden is 2-3 weeks behind the valley below.

He said “Keep your expectations low, this is basic gardening”, wow keep them low, how can we do that with all that lovely scenery! Thomas mentioned “We go for what I call a “National Park” look. The sort of landscaping we find here at national/state parks: basic, using natural materials, and almost exclusively native plants.”

Thomas’s space puts us in mind of Zdenko Franjic (DJ Zdena)‘s garden in Zagreb, Croatia another lovely spot which we covered a few years ago (more on Zdenko‘s garden here.)

Thomas also included a photo of his wood shed (above) “I’ve been spending an incredible amount of time this year sawing down trees and splitting wood. What’s in the shed is a fraction of it. Kind of back-breaking, but somehow satisfying at the end of a day.” What a lovely looking wood shed. We live in a place called Forest Hill but sadly there’s no wood-chopping done around these parts but if there were, we’d want a wood shed like that.

“We have made a few paths through the woods around our house this year, too. We do so not only to have more hiking trails, but it also makes it easier to see our flowering plants like Trilliums.” Thanks a million Thomas for sharing your inspiring outdoor space, it don’t half look magical!

We’re always up for seeing other people’s gardens, plants on windowsills or balcony spaces so please send us your pics and we’ll gladly post them up on Weeds.

And the beet goes on

Posted on April 2, 2020 by onedeckpete

And here’s something interesting from our good friend across the pond, Justin Patrick Moore with a piece that’s well up our street! Cheers Justin!

There is nothing like some good down beet veggies, and downtempo music, to get into an up beet mood. I was thinking of this yesterday when scraping out the remains of my crock full of homemade beet and red cabbage sauerkraut. I was also thinking about something I recalled from Sandor Katz’s book Wild Fermentation (where I learned the basic techniques for making kraut and sour pickles, among other things). He said something along the lines of “The only difference between rotting vegetables and a fermented food is salt.”

Boy, ain’t that the truth. Before I tried making kraut, I always thought it would be hard. It turns out its as simple as chopping up a bunch of cabbage, and other veggies, throwing a bunch of good salt on them, pounding them down into a crock, then sticking a plate on top of it all, with some weights or a clean rock you’ve boiled, and then waiting for the amazing lactic acid transformation.

Sandor’s recipe for Kraut and is super easy to make with just some basic equipment and veg. Recipe in detail here.

This batch of kraut that I made here included the following ingredients, all shredded, like a punker rocker making dangerous swipes at a guitar:

About 9 or 10 raw beets

1 head purple cabbage

1 bunch of radishes

1 turnip

1 head of garlic

3 or 4 habaneros

1 large piece of ginger

The ginger & habanero pepper marry really well together with the flavor of the beets. I suppose you could also use the juice to dye your hair red, or if you were wanting to make your own Hammer horror film.

(By another chain of association, all this puts me in mind of that classic Dead Kennedy’s album, Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables. Now you know there is a cure for that, just add salt.)

I’m looking forward to when my pickling cucumbers come up in the garden. That’s when I’ll use Sandorkraut’s sour pickle recipe again. Mr. Katz is a great author, and Wild Fermentation, and his other book The Art of Fermentation, cover not only kraut and pickles, but sourdough and other living breads, wine, beer, cheese and even stuff like how to make miso or tempeh. It’s one of the few kitchen books I have that really makes the stuff grown in the garden, whether mine, a friends, or something picked up at the market, really sing with all that salt. Once you make a few batches of something you’ll be experimenting and trying new things out in no time, because it really is pretty simple once you get the knack.

With all that, I’ll leave you with this groaner and a track called Cultivator Dub from the DJ Spooky vs. Twilight Circus Dub Soundsystem collaborative album Riddim Clash.

What do you call someone who raps about vegetables? A Beet boxer.

What’s in the mix?

Posted on March 11, 2017 by onedeckpete

Life is all about what’s in the mix and the above is what we recently found after clearing out our compost bin of its organic matter. There’s some surprises: a sonic screwdriver (for God’s sake), a silver teaspoon and a plastic bag with some Caesar Salad mix in it! It’s frightening as we think we’re really careful of what we put in the heap.

As for our latest bit of listening pleasure: the Rhythm Doctor’s audio mix for FatCat records (above), there’s no unwanted rubbish in there! Listen out for the following!

Ten On-U’s from The Head Gardener

Posted on August 16, 2016 by onedeckpete

The garden of earthly delights Big thanks to The Head Gardener aka Shane Q from the excellent long-running radio show The Garden Of Earthly Delights (for who Weeds’ own Madtone did a session for a few years ago) for getting in touch and sending some tunes. We’ve just heard that the show will return soon, broadcasting from a new studio in a converted toilet block in Milton Keynes (how good is that?)

If you want to know of the sort of stuff that’s played on the show before then, there’s mixes galore here, here and here and there’s even one aptly named “Melvin, gardening on a Summers evening.” It’s a show well up out street!

Shane has sent us Ten of his favourite On-U Sound tunes and there’s some crackers here. Here we go…

1: Bim Sherman: Nightmare