Here’s some pictures to convey how bad the weather was yesterday around 5pm in London town. It started as a downpour, then heavier rain and then mad hail! To say it was chucking it down was an understatement. A fast flowing stream appearing under the back gate from the drive and then the hail built up at the start of the lawn and it’s still there now.
Watch those seedlings. We may not be having frosty nights but heavy rain and hail can be a pain. One good thing with all of this rain is that the pond is filling up. That makes a change!
We were complaining a few weeks ago about that there weren’t enough rain as we’ve had to go out and manually water all the new additions to the garden.
In the past few days we’ve bought some lupins and stuck them together in a group in a bed near to the house, acquired some strawberry plants (cheers Dylan!) and as reported previously the tree lilies we were given (cheers Marc!) are also starting to come up. The giving and exchanging, the swap-shop value of gardening is what we love here, we also love the local garden centre (Shannon’s) for plants and advice and it’s nice to see the re-emergence of local plants sales (plant pots stuck on a wall outside someone’s house at cheap as chips prices) or have they never gone away?
What we don’t love is the current weather. For the past few days it’s been warm one minute, cold the next and then you see on twitter someone’s had a frost or a light dusting of snow. Well it’s back on with the protection in the evenings on top of the raised beds here even though the potatoes are coming on well and the plants that have been outside hardening off (above) will have to come in for the night. We won’t get too discouraged as it’ll be summer soon. Or will it?
Yesterday evening just after sundown we wandered to the bottom of the garden just to take in a bit of the night-time air. With a little bit of light coming from the back of a neighbour’s house we could just make out two frogs “doing lengths” in the newly renovated pond. Lovely to see them back. Nice to hear their croaks too!
The netting which keeps the Lewisham Heron from getting its beak in has a few raised areas at the side that night visitors can get in and out of and in the top left hand corner is a moss covered stick come frog ladder. it was great to see we have visitors making a trip and it’s been a while since we noticed we had frogs and we wonder if it was the ever decreasing depth of the pond was putting them off before.
It was also nice to see that the Tree Lilies we got given from our good mate Marc B (cheers for passing them on Marc!) have started to sprout! Here’s one of them above. That’s what’s good about gardening the receiving and passing on of surplus plants and seeds.
We’re writing this while listening to an old Ross Allenshow on NTS and this is playing from the late great Bunny Wailer.
And a couple of posts ago we posted up the track by L.S.Diezel called Volume 1 that had a lovely Yabby You sample in it and Ross has just played the tune that was sampled in a remix style. Tune! Roll on the good weather so we can play tunes like this loud!
In a few hours time the intergalactic and the very interdimensional sounds of KSOL will be back in orbit on the shortwaves. The satellite of love will hopefully be keeping out of the way of the Long March 5B rocket body which is heading to earth too (we’re keeping our fingers crossed that the rocket body lands in the middle of nowhere or in the ocean).
Tune in on 3955 kHz via Channel 292 at 2200 UTC (11pm UK time). The show will also be repeated next Saturday the 15th May at the same time. Radio conditions are good this evening and if by chance you haven’t a shortwave radio give this SDR a go here.
Expect a mix called “In Orbit” from the urban spaceman One Deck Pete at about 35 mins in which’ll feature tunes by A Man Called Adam, Rubin Steiner, Rockers Interplanetary and this great tune by AVEM. #KSOL #shortwavesnotdead #shortwavelistening #channel292
And talking of good tunes here’s one we were directed to on friday by L.S.Diezel called Volume 1 that has a lovely Yabby You sample in it. #dubsnotdead
UPDATE: And here’s the studio audio of KSOL with One Deck Pete‘s “In Orbit” mix at 35 mins in.
And as the wind and rain lashes against the back window here in south London on a May Bank Holiday Monday evening here’s some pics from our pond project that got away so to speak.
Firstly (above) the ton of sludge at the bottom of the pond that has now been distributed around the back garden and being washed into the soil as we write. When we looked into our empty garden pond we were reminded of one of our favourite places in London The Strand Lane “Roman” Bath (below) which is basically an old water tank too. More details about that wonderful place of “Antiquity” here.
When all gets back to some sort of normality it’s a place worth visiting perhaps just once. You can’t see anything at all through the dirty viewing window and if you are lucky to go inside, the smell of damp and lack of anything to actually capture your imagination will drive you out after five minutes. As a certain John Lydon (possibly) sang about the place once “The side of London that the tourists never see”.
And (below) the great piece of carpet underlay that was sitting on top of the skip when we walked back from the local shop with a cheap bucket and two pairs of long armed washing up gloves. It’s all about “keeping ’em peeled” as Shaw Taylor used to say combined with the old “make do with what you got” Punk maxim!
The job is near enough done! Apart from the last bit of smoothing out of the sides and cutting off the excess pond liner below the broken slabs, that’s it. The fish and the newts are back in, they’ve been fed and getting to know their new abode after being manhandled by the “Giant pink hands from the dry” (thanks to our good mate Marc b who coined this apt phrase.)
It looks though we’re in for some rain this evening and there’s a fair bit of wind about too. The rain will be good for the pond and the rest of the garden that is looking parched. And we’ve got a loads of silt and stuff that we added to the flowerbeds. Judging by the look of the stuff from the bottom of the pond it just has to be good for the garden (we hope!)
We took the plunge yesterday (rubbish pun intended) and made a start on clearing out the leaking pond and the mammoth task of putting in a new plastic liner.
After a couple of weeks of putting the job off after receiving some great advice from the staff at Shannon’s, we purchased the liner online (making sure we had a bit of excess around the pool in our calculations), got ourselves some trugs (Cheers Marc B!), some B&Q 99p buckets and chose yesterday as the day of reckoning.
In the morning a couple of pairs of long washing up gloves and another bucket was purchased from the local shop where we received some good luck from the shopkeeper when he learned what we were doing. On the way back from the said shop we found some carpet underlay in a skip which came in very handy too, especially on the very rough top of the old water tank which the water sits in. Once there would have been pond liner separating the rusty tank and the water but that’s not around today and that’s the problem. The water had a tinge of orange some days and was slowly losing water.
First thing was to take everything off the side, the broken slabs, plants, netting and what have you and it was time to drain out the pond by hand using buckets and the fish removed using an old kid’s fishing net from a seaside trip many many moons ago. The fish (and some newts) went in the buckets and trugs and any excess water and silt sludge went on the garden after being passed through an old cullender just in case there were any wildlife in the murky liquid. As we came to the end we were using jam jars to fill the bucket and a sophisticated dam system (a load of old housebricks) which worked. Talk about a sigh of relief and a big cheer when we got to the bottom!
After a break for lunch we laid the pond liner underlay over a thin layer of sand and over the carpet underlay that went around the top edge and some of the sides. The liner finally went on, placing it central to the pond leaving all of the excess which we’ll fiddle with today. The water was hose-piped in and we’ll have to wait at least 24 hours before the fish go back.
To be continued…
And to spur us on to the next part of the job this morning here’s a pond themed tune!
A couple of years ago we found a very odd looking hand-made coat stand in the street that had been thrown out and since obtaining it have tried with little success to try and grow something up it. We’re trying again this year with some sweet peas. We’ve put some small bamboo sticks in to give the plants a way to get to the main truck and we’re hoping for some climbing action. Perhaps we should just bin the thing but it’s so odd we have to keep it and at least it’s a alternative to the normal bamboo tripod. Who said gardening had to be conventional anyway?
And talking about oddness this thing has just popped up through the soil very close to the pavement in the side bed that has the new fence behind it. We have no idea what it is and we can’t remember sticking anything in that area. It’s a robust looking thing whatever it is. Any ideas?
Don’t forget this Sunday 2nd May 2021 at 2300 UTC (Midnight UK time)Radio Lavalamp will be taking to the shortwaves on 9395 kHz via WRMI which will include “The Purple Nucleus of Creation 004” mix by One Deck Pete with tracks from Floating Points, London Symphony Orchestra and Pharoah Sanders, Betelgeize ft. Ilya Chistyakov, Tranquility Bass and Hrair. Like the weird and wonderful and tunes like the GATS track below? Well tune in on Sunday night and see if there’s more stuff to your liking. If you haven’t a shortwave radio click here at the allotted time.
As mentioned in the last post Radio Lavalamp will be taking to the shortwaves very soon, as in this Sunday 2nd May 2021 at 2300 UTC (Midnight UK time) on 9395 kHz via WRMI. The show features some chilled tunes and also a mix from One Deck Pete called “The Purple Nucleus of Creation 004” with tracks from Floating Points, London Symphony Orchestra and Pharoah Sanders, Betelgeize ft. Ilya Chistyakov, Tranquility Bass and Hrair. Turn on and tune in.
And on the weekend after (and the one after that) KSOL is back in orbit in a “Satellite of Love” mode. It’ll be broadcast out of Germany via Channel 292 at 2200 UTC (11pm UK time) on 3955 kHz on Saturday the 8th and 15th May 2021.
And in keeping with the radio theme here’s a song about CW (Morse Code) by the great Ivor Cutler that was heard on BBC Radio 4’s Great Lives programme this afternoon.
Weeds up to me knees 