Category Archives: Jazz Gardening

Monty Don and a Philippe Starck toilet seat

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It’s been a bonkers week what with the kids going back to school and we also had a new toilet fitted. The last one used to randomly whistle and sing in the middle of the night, think of Aled Jones’ “we’re walking in the air” at 4am! The new one is a plush old thing obtained off our “Portuguese man with a van”. It was ripped out of a house in Chelsea as the posh owner didn’t like it after her bathroom was refurbished. Nearly new toilets eh, is that this years new thing? Turns out it’s a Philippe Starck and costs £300 new, we were getting it for £25 but as our man broke the seat in transit so we got it for nothing, bargain eh? Not really, the new seat will cost £50+ to replace! Designer loos eh, who needs the stress?

Popped into the garden centre yesterday to get something to stick in the area that the potatoes used to occupy (even the kids were starting to say “we don’t have to have spuds EVERY night do we?”). One thing with the internet, you might be able to get cheap plants but one thing you don’t get is good advice and a bit of banter. Our local garden centre is a family run affair and they’re used to my off the wall questioning. What’s good about them is that they are glad to pass on the information which I think is what it’s all about! Use your local garden centre, you’ll find out some great info, get great recommendations and keep the owners off the dole!

I got some over-wintering cabbages, a tray of twelve for £3, which ain’t bad even though my wife thinks the slugs will have them. When choosing something to plant, remember the crop rotation rule, the cabbages are in a different family to spuds, not ideal straight away after potatoes but they’ll do. I gave the area a good old hoe, took out any weeds and stones, made a slight depression and filled the row with a bucket’s worth of compost from the council supplied plastic bin started earlier this year. I spaced the plants out using a trowel’s length as a guide, firmed the plants in and gave them a water before the sun hit the area (I soaked the seedlings in the tray an hour before too). Voilà, two rows of slug food! It’s funny as the night before I watched Monty Don do exactly the same thing (not that I am influenced by the telly or anything, honest!)

Making plans for Nigel

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Now’s a good time to make a quick plan of the garden as this’ll help when you come to growing stuff next year, that’s unless you’ve given up and getting the garden paved over after the rubbish weather we’ve had this year! It don’t have to be a Picasso (I mean look at below it took us a minute to do on the train home), just something to remind you what was where, as you might forget come next year (I usually do).

When growing you must think about crop rotation (moving specific groups of vegetables around the garden). If the same vegetables were grown in the same place each year, certain nutrients would be taken out of the soil and the plants would be open to infection and disease. Crop rotation helps guard against pests and diseases by promoting healthier plants.

On the notes with the “growing food in the city” course at walworth garden farm (hi Scarlett!), it says “the simplest rule of crop rotation is not to grow the same thing in the same place two years running. The larger the gap between a crop occupying the same piece of ground the better” which is a very good and simple explanation of crop rotation.

I’ll go deeper into the subject in a later post but very simply, you group together certain families of vegetables and rotate these groups over a period of 3 or 4 years. How simple is that?

Gardening strange

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Big up to our very good friend from across the pond, Doctor Strangedub for his new reggaewise gardening mix first aired on this week’s “Echo Beach” show on WLUW-FM Chicago. It’s an excellent mix of dubwise in a horticultural stylee (he’s a keen gardener as well as a music lover) featuring Prince Far I, Leroy Sibbles, Jah Wobble. Lee Perry, DubXanne (ft. Ranking Roger) amongst other great stuff and includes Madtone’s “Compost your mind”. Dr Strangedub and DJ Baby Swiss’ excellent “Echo Chamber” show is on every Wednesday morning on KFAI and archived on the KFAI Website (http://kfai.org/echochamber). Big up all dub gardeners in the (green) house! A big cheers to Dr Strangedub for including the Madtone track.

Seaside special

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Last weekend we were away in the land of glorious sunshine, Camber Sands. You’d honestly think you were somewhere exotic what with the glorious weather there. The picture above was taken down the road from where we were staying, and it’s an ingenious way to use a boat in the garden!

While I was at camber I took home a carrier bags worth of seaweed to use in the garden (I’m not sure about the legality of doing that) alongside tasteful bits of driftwood, shells, stones and the odd old beer can to stick around our pond. All I got off my kids was “why are you bringing all that rubbish home for, Dad?”, brilliant eh?

As soon as I got back to London I gave the seaweed a good hosing down to get the salt off and left it at the bottom of the garden. After a couple of days in the hot sun it frizzled down to such a tiny amount there weren’t enough left to use as a mulch. I could have always make a seaweed plant feed but as there’s already a bucket of foul smelling liquid stinking up the garden it’ll be bunged into the compost heap. Seaweed is a great compost activator and adds minerals and trace elements to the heap. Nowt wasted then!

Here’s a tune that got played a few times while chilling in the sun at Camber. It’s from a while ago but a tune all the same!

Emperor Tomato Ketchup

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The garden seems to be going mad of late. The courgettes and the spuds are doing well and we’re seeing a bit of action on the climbing french beans and tomatoes.

I know it’s a bit late, but here’s a couple of tips when it comes to those tomato plants. If you’ve got the cordon type ones (not the bush or tumbling varieties) make sure that the side-shoots are pinched out regularly so all the goodness can go into the plant and the production of the actual fruit. I’ve a couple of plants in the raised bed that I have forgotten to do that are now going wild and a bit uncontrollable. Also when my plants get to about four or five trusses (the sets of flowers that later turn into fruit) I nip the tops out, so again the energy will go back into the plant (but keep an eye on the side shoots a while after you do this as they will tend to go mad). I do give them a regular water but not too much and a feed every ten days. I’ve had to buy some plant feed in, as my home-made attempts are still not ready yet.

The wormery (image above not to be viewed on a full stomach!) is cracking on and there’s a build up of nice looking compost at the bottom and the liquid in the bucket below is starting filling up too. All for recycling kitchen scraps, plant waste etc!

Also I have started to leave a combination of comfrey, nettle and borage leaves to rot in a small amount of water in a bucket at the bottom of the garden. It’s funny as sometimes it’s a bit like groundhog day. I go down there every now and again to have a check, lift up the slab of concrete that is acting as a lid on the stuff and have a sniff as I’m sure it’s supposed to pong a bit. A microsecond later the vile stench hits me… bang! When will I ever learn. If only the image below had a scratch and sniff and then you’ll know what I mean!

Also I heard a good potato tip on a podcast called “Gardening with Tim & Joe” from a show on BBC Radio Leeds. It can be a bit like 1970’s Radio 2 at times (“what’s the recipe today Jim?” etc) but there’s some great tips to be learnt there. The other week they were talking about harvesting potatoes. It was said you should go in once with a fork to pull up what you think are all the spuds, then go in another three times and you’ll get all the spuds you’d have missed previously. Good stuff!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/gwtj

200 metre tunage

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Benjamin Damage & Doc Daneeka – No One

I heard this on a strongroom alive podcast this week and it’s been going around my head since. A nice atmospheric tune with a warped vocal which builds into a bit of a bonkers monster! One to play while watching Jamaica taking all top three positions in the 200 metres on replay on the telly (with the sound turned down) again and again. Big up to the Jamaican runners for loving the people of Birmingham!

There’s some great stuff on strongroom alive including a child of the jago and ross allen shows, well worth a listen! http://www.strongroomalive.com/listen/listen-again/

 

More Genesis, Floyd, Jethro Tull, Yes? Not arf!

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Thanks to Will for sending this youtube clip that features the permaculture king, Mike Feingold in his allotment. He looks a right old character with his bonkers hair and overalls, but knows a thing or two about gardening. He even has a roll-up on the go while showing people around his polytunnel. That’s not healthy is it?

Anyway seeing this clip reminded me of a bloke I used to know in my late teens in Coventry. He was about the same age as Mike Feingold then, always wore a green boiler suit, had ginger hair in a ponytail, and loved the band Gentle Giant. He was a lovely bloke, lived in bedsit, always had a pot of tea on the go and his door was always open for visitors. He wasn’t overly keen on the work ethic though and had his unemployment benefit stopped for a while after an interview with a dole office official when he said “getting a job would interfere with my social life”. Not a great thing to say in a interview with the dole! Wonder what he’s up to now?

Wild world of sports

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A strange thing happened to me on my way home from work last Friday. I was outside Charing Cross station and saw the doorman of the hotel there laughing with a happy guy about to get into a smart looking car. He seemed to be ribbing the bloke about something who just smiled and laughed back. Anyway as I passed him I noticed around fifty pounds worth of tenners in his back pocket flapping about ready to fall out/be nicked. I tapped the guy on the shoulder and said “Oi mate, watch your money especially around here” to which he thanked me profusely, shook my hand, pushed the tenners deeper into his pocket and got into the car and I thought no more of it.

It wasn’t until a few hours later watching the opening ceremony of the olympics on the telly I spotted the guy walking into the arena holding the olympic flag with a few others (including Stephen Lawrence’s mum and Muhammad Ali). Only turns out the bloke was the Ethiopian long distance runner Haile Gebrselassie. How bonkers is that? I know zilch about sport so didn’t have a clue who he was at the time. Can I claim my free olympic family tickets now?

Hey Joe, where you goin’ with that pallet in your hand?

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As the weather was so nice last week, I walked from London Bridge to work a few times (cheers for the idea, Marc!). The things you see at 8 in the morning on the Southbank. Thursday saw dodgy flag sellers setting up shop to catch the tourists waiting for the Olympic flame to arrive (low quality union jacks for £2.50/£3.50, a bargain!) and on Friday at 7.55 am on the Millenium bridge, 20 or so bell-ringers standing around waiting for st pauls to “ring in” the olympics. The only thing that stood out about the gathering was a baby on a papoose facing outwards with the biggest “number 11’s” dripping out of it’s nose I have ever seen. Urghh! Poor kid.On the way over I did pass some great wooden pallet planters which were dotted about Jubilee Market around the corner from Southwark Cathedral. I was told local school kids had made them, not sure if that meant they actually got the black & decker workbenchs out or the kids just designed them. Some mad ideas though!

Ital feast

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Popped into Robert Dyas in the strand today to see if they had any decent seeds in their “half marked price” sale and found these two packs of “Italian Kitchen” Basil and Leaf Salad for the combined price of £1.84. These still can be sown outdoors and if you’re thinking of growing indoors (ie. in a pot on a kitchen windowsill), you can sow them anytime. If anyone tells you this gardening lark is expensive, they’re lying!