Looks like I’ll be making more pasta sauce this weekend! Below is just the start of the tomatoes and hopefully there’s a few more to come. A big thanks to all at Dig This Nursery for giving us a good few tomato plants earlier this year.
The plums on the right are off the dwarf tree we bought a few years ago from Shannon’s. Some years it does well and some not, but who cares. Plum crumble the weekend, I reckon.
I’ve been busy of late and have neglected me garden a little but I have a good few days next week to tinker around before I go away for me hols so I’ll be able to tackle those weeds! It’s looking good though, and that’s without a bit of TLC over the last week!
The storm over the weekend did do a little bit of damage to some of the plants especially a few tomatoes and the odd sunflower. Here’s the view before the storm, how mad is that pumpkin plant?
And I’ve never really grown peppers before, not bad for a first attempt and in an old tomato tin too!
Loving the tomatoes at the moment even though the storm at the weekend has nobbled a few plants. Looking good though!
Big up that old gardening lark!
Thanks to all at The Dirt “a gardening programme like no other” on Fab Radio International for featuring our very own “Sounds from the south” this evening. The topic this week is “Space Station Business.” If all goes well, it’ll be up as a podcast here from tomorrow. Big up “Veg 01” the lettuce in space (above.)
Big shout to Phil Harmony for linking us up with Jackie and Robert who’ve been running a guest house for the last six years in the fantastic surroundings of The Blue Mountains of St Andrew, Jamaica which is an hours drive from Kingston.
They run the Prince Valley Guesthouse which is at an altitude of 4,000 feet (look at the view below!) alongside running a Blue Mountain coffee farm which is about twenty years old. The coffee bushes are under the canopy of Banana, Mango and many other fruit bearing trees. Running a guest house must be hard enough in itself let alone growing Coffee as well, Jackie and Robert we salute you!
Here’s what Jackie and Robert sent to us about how their Coffee is produced over a typical year:
In January the small limbs are trimmed away on each coffee bush and fertiliser (20-20-20 All Purpose) is applied and every other year manure is also added. Insecticide is also applied in the early spring right after the coffee bush flowers. (Later on in the season they are also fertilised with a powder/granular at the roots.)
In March and April the white coffee blossoms start to appear which eventually produce the coffee berries. As the berry ripens it turns from green to a deep cherry red which are often called coffee cherries. The cherries are then ready to be picked around the middle of August.
The picking occurs twice a month and it takes about 6 pickers to do the job. Each tree produces one to two pounds of green coffee, which is what the coffee cherries are referred to before they are roasted, and after they are processed and dried. This is the form coffee is in when it is purchased by a roasting company.
The cherries are picked and put in boxes. Each box holds about 60 pounds of coffee cherries which will be processed into about 12 pounds of green coffee. Those 12 pounds of green coffee, once roasted, will yield about 9.6 lbs of coffee. The bi-monthly yield starts out slowly and at its peak is about 20 to 30 boxes per picking. This continues from August thru November. Our coffee cherries travel to Mavis Bank Coffee Factory where they are purchased and processed. The Jamaican coffee industry employs around 120,000 people making it a significant contributor to the country’s economy.
Good stuff! I personally don’t drink much coffee anymore as it sends me a bit hyper but I do like those naff gaelic coffees you used to get in those quality restaurants like Harvesters in the 70’s.
I also asked, what sort of pests they get in the land of wood and water, and it’s the same sort of stuff we get in the UK but they also get something called the Borer Beetle which is the main pest of the coffee plant. They sometimes hang a coffee borer catcher on the bush filled with a mix of water, soap, strawberry syrup & alcohol. That’s a mad combination!
But look at the flowers of the Blue Mountains, absolutely brilliant, I want some! Thanks for letting us use the pictures, please send us more, they’re great! Thanks again Jackie and Robert!
A nice tune for a lovely summer’s evening. A great vocal from Keith Blake/Prince Allah with some mad earthquake/explosion samples.
And for the dub side, the word heavy doesn’t even describe it. The late King Tubby was on top form with this one. Crank up that bass, annoy the neighbours (er only if it’s before 10pm as we wouldn’t want to instigate any asbo’s) and big up the King!
The International Space Station is on an orbit over the UK for viewing at a reasonable time this month and do remember it has the VPS (Vegetable Production System a.k.a “Veg-01”) on board, growing lettuces, pumpkins, carrots, runner beans and purple sprouting broccoli 200 miles above the earth. How good is that?
We all know there hasn’t been a slug launched into space as yet, so everything should be okay on that count (carrot fly are well out of the equation too) but the big question is, does a runner bean-cane tripod stay vertical when out of the earth’s atmosphere? I’ve left a couple of messages on the NASA answer machine asking them but they are not getting back to me just yet.
If you fancy a gander at the big tin can in space, just buy yourself a cheap compass off ebay (£2 ish) and tap in your location at the “Spot the ISS” site here which will tell you what time to look, in what direction and what angle to tilt your head up at. And to see where it is at the present moment have a look here.
A word to the wise though, don’t even bother with any sightings that are less than a minute as it takes about that long to locate the thing. Big up the ISS!
Thanks to Renato from Dig This Nursery for reminding us about the forthcoming Tomato Harvest Bonanza in a fortnight’s time on Saturday 9th August in New Cross.
Don’t be expecting to strip down topless and throw gone-off tomatoes at each other (as they do in Spain) as that sort of thing is frowned upon in New Cross. But do expect a free day of fun, live folk music, kid’s stuff and Tomatoes galore! Any advice you need about the Tomato plant do ask there as they’ll be someone who’d bound to know!
Thanks to our good friend Paul W for sending us this pic of a whopping courgette (aka zucchini) he saw outside a house on his way to work earlier this week in South London.
He wasn’t sure if it was an offering of the usual “take me” variety or the owners showing off in a “my zucchini is bigger than your zucchini” style!
Talking of courgettes, has anyone any good recipes using the old zucchini as I feel a glut coming on!
Big up to Simon and Paul from The Dirt (a gardening show like no other) for having a bit of a laugh with our Borage pronunciation debate on the show on Radio Fab International tonight.
Also a big shout to the show’s gardening expert/gentleman gardener Geoff Garrard for going for “bor-raj”, but we here are still sticking with “borridge” though! I mean it really don’t matter how we say it, the bees will still go mental for it!
The bees don’t care what it’s called but what do you think? The nation decides…
Thanks to Dr Strangedub for the link-up again in our “dub gardeners of the world unite” series which this time features Phil Harmony who produces the excellent dubnight radioshow from Berlin. If you’re into roots reggae it’s a great listen!
Phil’s got a great little balcony where he grows his edibles and has made a clever plant table on wheels to capture more of those rays from the sun! Here’s Phil with the words and pics.
My name is Phil Harmony and I’m the founder of dubnight radio show, DJ, music producer and someone who loves gardening. To watch my plants grow, it feels like I’m printing money and getting richer everyday. I love to go outside on my balcony in the morning (well, what I call morning!) and take a look at my plants and I’m always impressed by what’s happened overnight.
I got into gardening through my grandma and parents, who had a garden when I was young and we grew our own potatoes, salad, cucumbers, zucchini, carrots, spices and berries. At school we also had a garden and had gardening lessons and I learnt at an early age that the taste of home grown vegetables were much better than the ones you buy in the shops.
Now living in a flat in Berlin, I grow my own produce on a balcony (2.5m x1.50m approx.) and try to live a life that is as harmless as possible to the environment so I grow organically because we have enough chemicals in our lives. 
This year I decided to grow my vegetables in pots on a mobile stand slightly off the ground which gives them more control on how much light they get (pic above from earlier this season) and a hopefully a little bit more protection from the snails because last year they ate most of my plants (grrr!)
Using some wood which I had lying around, I made a stand and stuck some wheels on the bottom and now have something that I can now move to follow the sunlight because I only get usually get about an hour a day but my plants seem to be okay with it. All is growing pretty nice so far and I cant wait to eat my harvest! Above is the plant table now.
I have yellow cocktail tomatoes which are starting to ripen and tomatoes on the vine, a pepper plant and the world’s hottest chilli (below: the snack chilli and it looks great!)
I also grow herbs, marjoram and French and Morroccan mint, the latter which the snails seem to love! Another favourite is Oregano, I tend to overwater it a bit and use it regularly, thats why most of it has gone! (We at weeds love those half circle concrete things in the ground that the herbs are in. If they are deep enough they’d be great to restrict the roots on say mint which tends to run riot once it gets started.)
My Strawberries and Raspberries are in their first year so I’m not expecting much fruit but they’re looking healthy. Overall my soil could do with a bit more sand and sunlight, but the plants seem to live with it. The plants get regularly fed with a solution of stinging nettles which have been steeped in water and used coffee grounds added into the mix. 
Cheers to Phil for showing us his gardening exploits, it’s a great looking space and shows that you can grow vegetables and fruit anywhere!
Weeds up to me knees 