Here’s a lovely tune called Coconut Water by Black Quartz featuring Betty Room (iM Electronica) which is very nice and chilled for a Wednesday night.
Nothing much to report here apart from it’s bank-holiday-belated-bin-night and a spacecraft (funded by the dad of a lad called X Æ A-12) was supposedly going to appear over London tonight but didn’t. Another normal evening in lockdown then.
We didn’t do too much in the garden today (apart from the odd bit of watering in the morning) what with it being so warm. Sometimes it’s good just to stop and enjoy it all. The Love-in-a-mist at the bottom of the garden which self seeded in the champagne box that mysteriously appeared on our doorstep (here) in 2015 (Cheers Maz!) is now starting to flower.
And so are the spuds! How many weeks have we been in lockdown again?
And the garlic cloves we put in last autumn from Shannon’s to overwinter were harvested today. It seems a bit early but the leaves were starting to go yellow and the plants were falling down on their side so we dug them out. They’re now drying out for a couple of days outside the back door. The big question now is what shall we sow in the space where the garlic was?
Here’s today’s recording straight off the shortwaves of One Deck Pete’s “Tunes to cheer you up (3)”. The third tune in the series is Omeria with True Colors on the excellent Cafe De Anatolia. The label serves up some quality stuff, unlike radio conditions today!
It was lovely today, a bit hot at times but a good day to be out in the garden. We did something a little different, we went out there with no plans, just a broom, a hoe and pair of secateurs and see what jobs hit us at the time.
The pond is teeming with life at the moment, there’s hundreds of tadpoles and as you can see in the pic above there was something going on at the side as loads of them were flocking to that area, even the goldfish wanted to join in! A few water lily leaves and a couple of oxygenating plants were thinned out (and left on top of the netting for a while so if anything living was still on them, they wouldn’t have far to travel home.)
And we ripped off the polythene, cloches and bricks around the raised beds and stuck some bamboo canes in for that “established veg garden” look (even though it weren’t like that earlier today.) Everything is coming on nicely and some of the potato plants have even flower buds! Fingers crossed no more frost alerts as the protective polythene and old bed sheets have now been put out for the binmen!
By the way we have a new enemy at the moment, a crafty magpie who swoops in on a evening to rob the cat’s food just by the kitchen door. Who’d have thought it, the cheeky so and so! #gardeninginlockdown
And to accompany the writing of this gardening post the latest (64) This is a music show is playing with a great load of stuff as per mostly off CD but quality music all the same!
https://soundcloud.com/thisisamusicshow/this-is-a-music-show-064
Comfrey liquid, don’t we all just love it? Looks awful don’t it? Well imagine the smell is about 1000 times worst as how it looks and you’re close. Drain out the liquid from the above abyss into a bottle then transfer a capful into a watering can and add some H20 and you’ll have some top end plant feed, we kid you not. As well as being bunged into a 1980’s Boot’s homebrew bucket we’re use a leaf or two to put below tomato plants (and other seedlings) before they go in the ground. A very versatile plant and the bees don’t half love it!
The actual plants where we’re taking the leaves from are taking a hammering at the moment (and it’s not even June!) but they don’t seem to mind. If you’re going to get some go for the “Bocking 14” variety. As the song goes: comfrey, what is it good for?
Looking on BBC Weather we see that it’s going to be a warmer 8 degrees overnight in London so we’ve done away with the frost protection.
It hasn’t been easy y’know, all that old polythene, an old window frame, jars, an upside down fish tank and all sorts have been over those plants for the last few weeks now so we don’t know how we’re going to cope with knowing they won’t be there tonight. Fingers crossed! #lockdownfrostparanoia
It’s been a nice day today and judging by the weather forecast (above) it will be a bit warmer than last night. So that’s why the protection from the cold has been put on in a nonchalant fashion? Fingers crossed there’ll be no frost tonight then as B&Q bargain buckets balanced on top of potato plants and polythene “sort of” put over raised beds aren’t going to do that much!
And as there were problems with the last transmission, this Sunday will see the Free Radio Skybird show that was promised last week being broadcast, which features One Deck Pete with Tunes to cheer you up at 28 minutes in. If you haven’t a short wave radio click here at 1100 UTC/1200 UK Sunday. Tune in by any means possible!
It was funny old weather again today, cold then later on in the day it heated up a bit. Judging by the weather forecast for tonight it’s supposedly the last one where there’s a possibility of frost (London has a low of 3 degrees tonight and then tomorrow night it goes up to 7). Our hotchpotch collection of frost protection is out in full force this evening complete with an old duvet cover thrown over some of the spuds (we got that great idea off twitter the other morning!) One of the potato plants is even starting to form flower buds. How long have they been in the ground again?
Also the dahlia’s are starting to show through so some of that black membrane we bought to stick under the decking before it went up has been thrown over the top. What month is it again? And whilst you’re there, can you tell us the year? #gardeninginlockdown #canwecomeoutnow?
A good mate recently said that a druid told him once that a full moon encourages flowers to bloom. Well we had a nice full moon the other night which must have brought these out that were all seen today. The broad (broader than broadway) beans up near the house:
And on a horse chestnut up the local park spotted whilst on our lockdown exercise hour:
It’s been a mixed bag of weather here today in London and tonight is supposedly to be around the 7 degree mark (Wednesday night it’s back down to 4 apparently), tropical compared to last night, but the frost protection may be put in place again. Just to be on the safe side…
A big shout to our good mate Marc B for sending over some pics of his garden. Because of that damn lockdown all sorts of gardening jobs have been undertaken which ain’t a bad thing. It was Marc’s new compost container (you know we’re a bit passionate about trips to stick in single teabags in the compost bin at the moment) made from a couple of wooden palettes that caught our eye first. The foxgloves and the aliums in front of it look great too! We do love a foxglove here and aliums are great, you can have them just dotted about here and there or grown in big clumps. Love those purple ones.
Here’s some nice plastic bottle slug and snail repellent with an added coffee ground minefield and we can even see one of the damned gastropods (in the top right) getting as far as away as possible by the look of it!
And here’s something that tolerates all sorts of conditions and is low maintenance but looks great. We don’t know a lot about ferns but we do know there’s a few to choose from if you wanted to go down that road (aka Pteridomania.) We love the mosaic behind it!
And Marc gave us a great tip about the excellent radio station Venture FM which playing some excellent reggae, soul and the like over the airwaves in London but available for all the world to hear online here. Cheers for the tip and the garden photo’s Marc!
Do send us your garden, windowsill, balcony gardening pics as we love them here! onedeckpete (at) gmail.com
Weeds up to me knees 