Big shout to Fenny for playing this on last week’s On the Wire. It’s a wonderful bit of music from Cerys Hafana called Helynt Ryfeddol which features a triple harp. It’s a tune that reveals itself with every listen and one that will fit in just fine on the next instalment of HARP from Imaginary stations.
A big thanks go out to our old friend Chris D (who we went to see The Clash in Bury St Edmunds with many moons ago here) who now resides in Adelaide, Australia for getting in touch. He’s got a new house and has been busy transforming the solid clay and weeds that were there beforehand into a smart looking garden (above and below).
It’s still only early days yet and things will progress but it’s looking brilliant. The two pics below were at post weed eradication stage. What started as rock-hard clay in summer and sticky, mud that sticks to your boots in the winter is now turning into something special. We know what you mean about that clay soil Chris!
He did a lot of the work himself but got a bit of help in where he needed things building, pavements laying and gravel being put down. We love the idea of the raised beds (with decent compost in it) which’ll give the plants a fighting chance in the tough conditions out there what with the snakes (!) and rabbits combined with the searing sun.
He’s already watched blackbirds helping themselves to his strawberries he told us. It’s annoying but in a way it’s a sign that things are growing. We reckon it’s out with the old strawberry nets or put those old CDs on string which’ll move in the breeze that’ll hopefully deter them.
Alongside strawberries, he’s managed to get a great range of things growing already: herbs, carrots, beetroot, strawberries, raspberries, capsicum, beans, peas, cucumber, chilli, spinach, tomatoes, asparagus, Jerusalem artichokes, lettuce, tangelos, kaffir limes, Tahitian limes, mandarin, nectarines, pear, apricot, and even honeydew melons. Wow, that’s a load of stuff.
We’d love to see how the garden progresses so do keep us updated Chris and send us some pictures of how things get on. That hard work has really paid off we reckon and there’s some nice ideas in the garden as well. We love that container below by the way. Cheers again Chris and good luck with everything.
He sent us a couple of tune recommendations. First The Wiggles covering Tame Impala.
And a bit of a classic from the production talents of Mikey Dread with Parrot Jungle.
And Fat Freddy’s Drop with Blackbird.
Big thanks to Debby H for sending us a great picture today (above) of possibly the last cosmos of the year in her garden. She said, “If the weather brightens up later on, I will go out and deadhead them, then maybe they will keep on flowering.” Great stuff! We hope they do keep flowering.
Now we love the cosmos, we can’t stop seeing them about. Here’s one spotted on our early morning travels in SE23 this week, they’re a bit blurred but you’ll get the gist.
And a few doors down we saw a nice raised (vegetable) bed with some trellis used as a squirrel, pigeon and general pest deterrent, what a clever idea.
And from gardening we move onto the subject of music which goes hand in hand here on Weeds. We heard Skinshape x Horus – N’Téro (feat. Modou Toure) on last week’s Ross Allen NTS show here and it’s a lovely slice of reggae! Catchy as anything too.
Here’s a nice bit of dub called Order Dub for a Saturday night off the Self-Titled EP from Nadia McAnuff & The Ligerians from SoulNurse Records out of Tours, France from the golden year of 2022. It’s a subtle bit of mixing but lots going on if that makes sense.
And we just found by pure chance now on Bandcamp a do over of a version of Dennis Walks‘ Heat Don’t Leap by the one and only Gregory Isaacs called Gone is the Love from a good few years ago. Great tune!
And funny enough there was a few cuts of the original “Heart Don’t Leap” and more great tunes on On The Wire the other week. Listen in here!
Do you reckon the weather will hold out for gardening tomorrow? It was perfect here this morning and afternoon. Fingers crossed!
This week we bought some seeds from the great Real Seeds. They offer a fantastic selection of unusual varieties, from chillies and herbs to edible flowers. The last time we ordered from them was a couple of years ago, back when we were still getting used to growing with peat-free compost and lost quite a few seedlings but we’re trying again. We ordered some walking onion bulblets and seeds of lemon drop hot citrus pepper, prairie fire mini-bush chilli pepper, Korean mint and marvel of Peru (AKA the four o’clock plant).
As per sowing instructions for the walking onions, we opened the packet and stuck the bulblets in a pot of compost straight away. Technically, you only buy one bulblet but they generously include extras in case of poor germination, we received four! Along with every order, they send clear growing and seed-saving instructions, and even recipes where relevant. Real Seeds really has its heart in the right place. Their passion for sustainable growing and seed saving makes them well worth supporting so have a butcher’s here.
While browsing their site, we spotted a recommendation for the excellent Grow Your Own Vegetables by Joy Larkcom. We managed to pick up a second-hand copy this week for under a fiver and it’s an absolute bargain!
Comprehensive ain’t the word, this book covers it all: tools and equipment, choosing and preparing your growing site, composting, soil structure, seed sowing and planting, clever space-saving ideas, and even a full vegetable directory packed with growing tips and advice. It’s one of those books you’ll keep going back to time and again for reference and well worth getting your hands on.
Have a great weekend and hope you can get out and do a bit in the garden!
Thanks a million to the one and only Rhythm Doctor for playing One Deck Pete’s “Put a sock in it” mix (originally for Imaginary Station’s KTAB) 11.30 mins in on his “Mojo” It’s a mix up of some fine funk, jazzy stuff, latin, soul, ska and whathaveyou. More on the show here.
Tracklistings:
Jimmy James – Come to me Softly
Off a Jamaican 7″ single on WIRL from 1962 from the man Jimmy James as in Jimmy James and the Vagabonds “I’ll go where the music takes me” fame.
Kouta Katsutaro – Asu ha otachika
Off the wonderful set simply entitled “Kouta Katsutaro” on Death Is Not The End’s Bandcamp (here).
King Stitt/Tommy Mc Cook – Sauvitt
As sampled by One Deck & Popular on “Son of Stitt” (here) and a version of Mongo Santamaria‘s Suavito (here).
Alick Nkhata – Kalindawalo Ni Mfumu
This track is something else! A sort of Rock n Roll stomper, with some lovely harmonies and some horns courtesy of a Coventry Salvation Army brass band sound-alike and someone tinkling those ivories very skillfuly towards the end. It don’t get much better than this. On an LP called Radio Lusaka off the mighty Mississippi Records Bandcamp here.
Marty Robinson – Follow you
From a very battered Coxsone Dodd white 7″ blank and later released on his Port-O-Jam label. M (Martell/Marty) Robinson may have lived in the Coventry/Birmingham area for a bit too. More about the artist here.
If you remember, our friend and Downbeat on Shortwave collaborator Jesse Yuen (of RTMFM’s North of The River Swan) moved into a new house in Perth last year and is doing some major work on his front garden. His last post was here and we’ve got an update and it’s a great one!
“Okay, so this is the next chapter in what I’m calling “re-wilding” our front yard…”, over to you Jesse:
The house was built in 1963 and right up to that point, our property was just undeveloped bushland. In the ’50s and ’60s the urban sprawl in Perth started to spread through our suburb and giant bush blocks owned by rich people were divided up into smaller lots and sold off as private properties. At the same time the government built road infrastructure through the area and our house was one of the first built on the street. We bought the house from the family who built it, who had raised a couple of generations of kids in it so when we moved in, it still felt very much like theirs.
We purposely let the front yard die, didn’t water the lawn for a year, ripped up the non-local vegetation and essentially completely neglected it. People walking past must have thought we were crackheads, because it was looking very rough by the end. The goal was to remove the effort of clearing it by hand, let it die naturally and create a sustainable garden that probably was similar to what would’ve been growing there 100 years ago.
We adopted a technique we’ve heard about called “smothering”, essentially covering the entire area in cardboard, watering it in so it moulded to the present topography and then laying a heavy amount of mulch on top. The weeds and the things we didn’t want would be starved of sunlight and oxygen so not being able to photosynthesise and die without needing any pesticides or laborious weeding.
We progressively laid cardboard over the entire garden and weighed it down with bricks then watered it all in, making it mushy and soft and moulding itself into the ground. I’ve been saving up cardboard for the last year, luckily moving house means you have a lot of the stuff on hand. It was great to use all our own cardboard rather than buy it and we also had some concrete around the house from renovations and stuff too. I salvaged a bunch of slabs from the back yard and made a cute little path through the front of the garden.
I was incredibly disheartened to find that within weeks, local weeds had figured out how to grow through the cardboard through the mulch (below). The primary villain in this war of weeds Is this one: Oxalis pes-caprae, commonly known as African wood-sorrel, Bermuda buttercup, Bermuda sorrel, buttercup oxalis, Cape sorrel, English weed, goat’s-foot, sourgrass, soursob or soursop.
Kids growing up in the ’80s and ’90s in Perth called it sour grass and we would eat the stems and the flowers for snacks, even though it is incredibly sour as the name suggests. Without a doubt if you were seen picking it, a kid would tell you that a dog probably had peed on that patch of sour grass but you’d probably ate it anyway. This weed comes from a bulb buried deep underground and I must’ve left tons of it buried in the soil because it’s everywhere now.
You can see how long its stem is (above), it’s probably extended itself maybe 20 cm to burst through the cardboard and the mulch to find the sunlight. Really impressive, life will find a way right? They have come up everywhere in the garden and I’m experimenting with pouring boiling water over it all because I refuse to use any chemical chemicals to kill the weeds.
By the way, these last couple of days was heavily soundtrack by this tender, contemporary jungle album by Coco Bryce.
Cheers Jesse for sharing your story and pictures, we really appreciate it and look forward to the next part which he says is a cracker. “There are some nice plants coming along in the yard and some of them are getting a lot of commentary from the neighbours as they walked past which is great too.”
Here’s a wonderful tune found while looking for music for a forthcoming shortwave mix and again it is from the ever-wonderful Mississippi Records here. From the lovely cover of the LP with a beaming Alick Nkhata behind a radio mike in a room full of records, this tune Kalindawalo Ni Mfumu has a sort of a rock n roll feel, lovely harmonies with even a brass band (it sure sounds like it) and lovely tinkering of the ivories thrown in towards the end. This tune will not fail to make you smile!
Early this morning we popped down B&Q in Bell Green for some liquid fertiliser as we’re not producing enough comfrey leaves to make the liquid feed we’re used to putting on our garden (Above: crow waiting for bus home like us at 8.30 am).
Something we should look into is the NPK content that comes on the side of the bottle denoting how much Nitrogen (N), Phosphorus (P), and K for Potassium (or Potash) is in the liquid. As we’ve always used home-made comfrey liquid and mixed in compost on the beds, that’s something we’ve got to research about more.
Back home we spent a good hour or so feeding the back garden including the giant sunflower which is reaching skywards. We’ve 3 sunflowers, this 8ft monster and another 2 that are about 5 foot. It must be all about where they’re placed and how much sun they get. We love the sunflowers as the tops do follow the sun about during the day.
And this week we were told about this video, 10 vegetables/fruit that we don’t bother with anymore. We’re talking skirret, alexanders, good King Henry, medlar, chickweed, scorzonera, welsh onions, lovage, tansy (“The punk rock herb…” “…that demands respect and attention” as the bloke describes it, we love that!) and turnip greens. We wonder as food fashions come and go, will any of these “old time something come back again” as the song goes?
And two tunes about flying winged things:
The first a nice dub number from Derajah meets The 18th Parallel called Dub Crow.
The next is an a excellent tune released by the wonderful Sublime Frequencies out of Seattle, Washington, it’s by Chhoun Vanna and called To Tea Yum Chlong (Birds Are Singing But My Lover Won’t Return). At 2.45, it just ain’t long enough.
“The birds are chirping, to and fro
My love, have you forgotten me?
As water can’t cut through the sand
I can’t cut you from my memories
The bridge (between you and I) has broken
The pathway is gone, and the water is so very deep
How am I to find you on the other side, so far away?”
Thanks to fleurmach.com for the lyrics.
We can’t get enough of this tune since first hearing this. It’s released on the great Serafin Audio Imprint and as they say on the tin (labelled Bandcamp), “We are a fine little Imprint from Germany supporting slow and beautiful music all around the world” and they don’t half! This one is from Laaar and it’s called A familiar feeling and by the way, all of the EP it’s from is worth listening to!
And if you like tunes that sample shortwave radio like we do, here’s one by Hali Palombo called Contestia using a vocal sample off the Shannon Volmet, more about what a Volmet is here.
Here’s a lovely chilled-out balearic mix from a long time friend Will J, who actually introduced us to the exellent Echo Chamber radio show on KFAI many many moons ago we remember (Dr Strangedub of said show’s raised beds were the feature of last post funnily enough!)
Reminiscent of those old C90’s from Jose Padilla and the balearic bailiff himself Phil Mison, the hour’s tape includes some excellent tracks including this one:
It’s a mix well worth playing loud when the sun comes out next (or even when it’s raining as it will cheer you up). Good stuff Will!
Weeds up to me knees 