Zen and the art of the hoe

Posted on April 21, 2013 by onedeckpete

A rare sighting of The Lonely Hoe in the middle of Albert Embankment at 7.55am last Friday “tipping around” with a sharp one. Was he “one with the hoe” or thinking of downing pints with his mates at 5pm? We can only guess.

Ten minutes later I spotted a bloke in dark sunglasses with his hood up, bad kiddy rave blasting out of his headphones, reading a magazine while sitting on a plastic garden chair with a cushion behind him. He was “minding” a wire slowly coming off a roll going down into one of those BT holes in the ground. I wanted to say to him “excuse me my good man, sorry to disturb you but where do I get an application form for your type of position?” but thought better! Big up the (council) work ethic! The composition above is entitled, “The hole and the chair (but no worker)”.

Soldier, sailor, tinker, council gardener

Posted on April 17, 2013 by onedeckpete

This week has been a lot better on the weather front. Last Sunday I “tipped around” in the back, stuck in the last of the seed potatoes (5″ deep just to avoid any future frosts!), weeding and generally tinkering around and also sowed indoors some different varieties of basil (cinnamon, lemon and also lime, great eh?). I also moved some cabbage and sweet pea seedlings off the kitchen windowsill into the mini cold frame which will start them off on the hardening off journey. I take the window frame off during the warmer days and put it over at night so they slowly will get accustomed to the outside climate.

Tonight I checked the bucket that the comfrey liquid has been fermenting in for the past few months at the bottom of the garden. I think it’s now time to bottle it up as there’s maggots in there now! That’s not right is it? Or are they like the maggot at the bottom of the Tequila bottle, I reckon I should stick them on the garden to see if they work wonders like the Tequila worm is supposed to (it’s never worked for me!).

Also was listening to the great podcast that is BBC Leeds’ “Gardening with Tim and Joe” and they mentioned they were recently featured in the top 5 gardening podcasts in The Guardian online. That Joe Maiden certainly knows his onions (and his leeks, daffs, roses, rhubarb etc). Always worth a listen and top tips galore, all for a free download. Can’t be bad!

Spring, why haven’t you sprung yet?

Posted on April 9, 2013 by onedeckpete

Dub Chairman – Soldier (Citadel Records) 2004
Big up to Terry C for playing this on last week’s Echo Beach, a lovely tune from yesteryear reminding me of the best bits of the Thievery Corporation put through the blender with the sound of an ice cream van. Come on Spring where are you, mate? Click here to listen to the tune while pondering when it’s going to get warmer.

Nowt to do with David Mancuso’s one

Posted on April 3, 2013 by onedeckpete

No 1. In a occasional series. Club Disobey Beermat

Here’s the first in the series of artifacts which are festering alongside bad quality punk bootlegs, 1980’s reggae soundtapes and balearic mix tapes oxidising in boxes in my loft (or found between two 12″ singles like this one was) seeing as I couldn’t get out in the garden today. Man, it was like a different world temperature-wise compared to yesterday. I found it hard to go out to the shops let alone do any gardening.

Club Disobey was a top club in the mid to late 90’s sometimes held upstairs at the Garage in Highbury & Islington where DJ Beekeeper (Bruce Gilbert from Wire who has been known to DJ at other clubs inside a replica of his own garden shed) would play his bonkers selection (which might include the sound of fireworks amongst other daft things) and on one occasion where Richard D. James plugged in his Argos smoothie maker and Wickes power drill to compliment his DJ set. Giveaways were of the regular kind and here’s one of them, a lovely Bee themed beermat. Big up the Bee, gardening wouldn’t be the same without you!

Half term something come back again

Posted on April 3, 2013 by onedeckpete

Yesterday was a bit of a blinder weather-wise. There was a thick frost during the early hours of the morning but in the afternoon it was well nice and even got slightly warm! I’m off for the half term so I got the old flymo out and did the lawn, forgetting to go around the remains of an old bush in the middle of the grass thus mangling the metal blade of the mower in the process. It was nothing that could be sorted with a slight modification with a pair of pliers!

I’ve been warming up a bed for the past few days (where spuds are going to go) using some horticultural fleece and yesterday took the massive risk of putting in a small handful of seed potatoes and sticking the fleece back over, anchoring it down with bricks and stones as you know it’ll be cold again. I only put in about 6 so if they fail it will be only 90p wasted (they were 15p each at the great seed swap/spud event in Sydenham) but they are buried in about 3″ of pre-warmed soil and have fleece over the top of them so fingers crossed!

I also stuck one of the already chitted seed potatoes (the end with the nice green tips go skywards up!) in a large sack covering the tips of the chits with about an inch or so of compost and will keep adding more once they start growing. I put the sack in the homemade cloche/mini cold frame where it’s in the company of two seed trays of cabbage seedlings. The sack could’ve be started off in a conservatory or a porch keeping them out of way of the mad spring weather so give them a good start before moving them outside in a couple of months when the weathers better. More half term gardening reports to come…

Daddy, what did you do in the punk/rave wars?

Posted on March 26, 2013 by onedeckpete

Last weekend I uploaded some Steroid Abuse flyers and my old fanzine Ded Yampy from many moons ago to the blog so they’re up on the web for prosperity. Have a butchers at “Fanzines, flyers and flymo’s” and also the updated “The man and his music”. Roll on the good weather so I can get out in the garden or the next posts will feature the contents of my loft!

Saturday night and Sunday morning…

Posted on March 24, 2013 by onedeckpete

Lion Babe – Treat me like fire
Here’s a piece of lovely R&B tuneage been put through the lo-fi filter. An excellent tune played to death on Gilles P’s show. Lovely!

Almost there, yeah yeah

Posted on March 17, 2013 by onedeckpete

I saw a council worker giving a lawn it’s first cut of the year on Friday. Alright, it was tipping it down and he was wearing a balaclava, thick wooly gloves, a cossack’s hat and had a big coat on but he was cutting grass all the same. I reckon spring has nearly sprung!

The other day I was chatting to a maintenance chap at work who told us a great tip, he uses empty containers from office water fountain as cloches. All he does is saws the bottom (the wider end) off and then sticks them over his tomatoes and potatoes thus giving them an early start. How good is that?

Now if you are sensitive to plant container-abuse please look away now.

The above is a very shocking example, the smart looking container in the NCP car park in Covent Garden which was looking well neglected anyway now has some plastic plants hoofed in it. How crap is that? Gardeners in that area if you have some spare plants free, you know where you can stick a few. Plastic fantastic? I don’t think so!

Now finally on a brighter note, is news of an excellent seed offer passed onto us by our good mate Paul Walker (nice one Paul!). A herb or salad leaf seed bundle for £2, brilliant. In the salad leaf bundle you get 14 packs of seeds, growing bag and book and in the herb and vegetable one, 11 packs with the bag and book. The herb one has a few different varieties of Basil including Lemon, Lime, Sweet Genovese and Cinnamon. Looks well worth it! Click here for the offer. I think you can have one of each per household. Big up the spring and cheap seeds!

The way I walk is just the way I walk

Posted on March 10, 2013 by onedeckpete

There’s a brill offer at Shannon’s Garden Centre in Forest Hill at the moment, they’re doing five herb plants for a fiver, that’s good isn’t it? It’s a great place, well stocked and the staff are always eager to help.

I was around there as soon as I found out about the offer and for my fiver I got a Mint (I needed some leaves for a kebab recipe that afternoon and there was none in our garden, far too cold!), Coriander, Lavender, Rosemary and the very odd Tree Onion (aka Egyptian Onion.) If you’re around the Forest Hill locality and want to take up the offer click here for the form to claim your herbal discount!

Southern freeez

Posted on February 25, 2013 by onedeckpete

It’s been too cold this week to do any gardening but the Sunday before last I cleared out one of the compost bins (supplied free from Lewisham Council) and got three barrows worth of rich looking humus. Over the last year I’ve tried to be very careful what I put in the bin but I still found a blue biro, gardening wire, green plastic plant tags, chocolate wrappers and a couple of crisp packets! I have now a old plant pot down there as a rubbish container for those “I can’t see a bin so I’ll hoof it in with the compost when no one’s looking” moments!

I spread the muck over a couple of beds where this year I’ll be be sticking in vegetables that’ll benefit from the richness of the soil like potatoes and courgettes. I also have to consider what’s been in the beds previously as you can’t have the same (or related) plants growing in the same area year after year. If so the plants would will drain nutrients making the soil unbalanced, and also leave it open to pests and diseases which in turn would infect the plants. You use something called crop rotation to counteract this, which is in it’s simplest form is putting vegetables into specific groups and rotating these groups one season after another in your plot/beds. More on crop rotation to come.

Also this week while bringing one of our cats to the vets in New Cross I passed a woman struggling with two very large plastic plant pots (nearly 4 foot wide and probably the same height) on a crossbar of a pushbike. It turns out the pots were being thrown out on a building site. She told me she was going to use them for spuds, but if you saw the size of them a couple of small fruit trees would fit in them!

Do remember those free seed tokens in the Daily Mirror this week. I’ll be bribing roadsweepers, newsagents and train cleaners to try and get some extra tokens. Keep em peeled!

Weeds up to me knees

Madtone, gardening and life

Category Archives: Jazz Gardening