A pictorial gardening report from near Coventry

A big thanks to Mike & Julia from outside Coventry for some snaps from their great garden. As before we are going to let Julia’s brilliant pictures do the talking, and there’s some wonderful stuff here as ever. As Mike said in his email “Things are happening in our garden”. They certainly are!

Cheers for sending these pictures over and may your garden carry on looking great for the rest of this year!

STOP PRESS: Julia has just come back with the plants featured in order as in the blog post. Thanks Julia!

Allium
Salvia – hot lips
Alstroemeria
Geums with wallflowers in front
Geums with a lupin type bush which I have never seen before and am not quite sure what it is
I think it’s a penstemon
Yellow poppies and geranium

More from north London

Thanks to Debby H for sending us an update today. Above are the Marconi Red peppers and the dwarf sunflowers (below). “These are the plants from the house in the next street to ours” and the plants looks healthy. The peppers have a few flowers on one of them as well.
Below are the peonies in her garden (below) which have great looking flowers! We’re only at the start of the growing season and the garden can only get better. Cheers Debby, thanks for sending the updates!
The weather looks like a bit of rain later this week by the way so they’ll be another growth spurt out of our plants in our gardens we reckon.

They Could Have Been Bigger than the Beatles

At 2.58 above is a tune that made us smile this week while putting together another shortwave mix for Imaginary Stations. It’s called Beatles and the MBE from Lord Short Shirt & The Silhouettes and even if you’re not keen on the Fab Four this’ll cheer you up.

More from north London

A big thanks to Debby H who sent us some pictures of how things are getting on gardening wise in north London. First are the cosmos (above) which are looking healthy. Those inner toilet tubes seem to be working well as plant pots by the way.

And above are the tomato seedlings which are sown in an interesting way as we usually sow one to a pot, but this method seems great. The tomatoes as well as the cosmos are ready to be repotted, and Debby has given us a great idea for further sowings.

Above is the azalea in her garden is looking great. As she wrote “I just found that the azalea is a type of rhododendron.” We didn’t know that.

And Debby has just got back from a break in Suffolk. “By the coast near to Dunwich the whole area was covered in the most amazing yellow flowering gorse bushes” “It went on for miles. I have never seen it looking quite so spectacular.” Brilliant stuff Debby, cheers for the update and we look forward to more pictures this year.

Some pictures from Sicily

A big thanks to Rich R in the Lake District for sending us some pics from his break in Catania, Sicily. The first is of some well interesting wild flowers (above). We’ve looked on plant.id and it says the plant is called lantana. What a great looking plant.
The above is Taormina railway station (above) and there’s more about it here. It’s one stylish train station.
Below is the view of Mt Etna from his hotel in Catania. Cheers for sending them over Rich and hope you had a great time over there.

Shout to all the twin cities reggae radio crew

A big shout to our good friend Dr Strangedub who presents The Echo Chamber (with DJ Baby Swiss ) on KFAI out of Minneapolis, Minnesota for playing Jasmine Tutum & Madtone‘s Earth Citizen on this morning’s show at 37mins in (tune in here).

As we have said many times before, the Echo Chamber is the show to tune into on a Wednesday morning at 8am UK time for 4 hours (count them) of reggae, dub, downtempo and all sorts of bass heavy stuff and more. Cheers again Dr Strangedub!

And here’s a great track from the show called Don’t worry what the people think about you (Dub) from Dubblestandart & Jasmine Tutum.

Not waterloo Sunset

Cheers to Rich R in the Lake District for the latest picture from there of a lovely sunset from the other evening, it don’t half look glorious. We even love the way the sun is shining off the barbed wire.

And cheers to Rich also for a pic from last night of ELO Musk’s rocket taking what is called a fuel dump. As it reported on the BBC website “… told the BBC that as he was taking out his bins in Suffolk he saw a “huge catherine wheel which appeared to have its own atmosphere around it”. We’re taking out our bins at Weeds HQ in a minute and hope we don’t see anything like that in the sky here in SE23. Cheers again Rich!

It looks like spring has sprung

Pic: The pond this morning.

A big thanks to our good mate Gerry Hectic for sending us a mix to celebrate this first day of spring called “A sunshine mix in spring”. It’s a brilliant garden/nature related mix and one to have on when you’re sowing those first vegetable/flower seeds indoors on the potting table (in our case the kitchen sink!)

Here’s the tracklisting:
Intro – Ursula Rucker (& Charles Webster) – Begin Anew (Acapella) Edit)
Alabaster DePlume – That Was My Garden (Edit)
Tunng – Snails
Oscar Jerome – Smell The Daisies feat. anaiis (Radio Edit)
THSA – In Bloom
Late Nite City – Higher Ground
United Freedom Collective – Moonshine
lovetempo – But I Do (Daisybelle Remix)
Gabril Gosse – Breeze ft. Emile Parisein
Shane Sato – Gardenia
Yahushi Ide – A Place In The Sun
Ebi Soda – Bamboo
Evren Furtuna – Little Flower
Ursula Rucker (& Charles Webster) – Begin Anew (Acapella) Edit)
Chaos In The CBD – Midnight In Peckham ft. Isaaz Aesilli
Ursula Rucker (& Charles Webster) – Begin Anew (Acapella) Edit)

So raise a toast to Jean-Michel Jarre if you’re that way inclined or just to the forthcoming season when one day soon you will wake up and not see a frost. Cheers Gerry!