Last night fueled by supermarket bottled lager, I decided to go through a few forgotten about second-hand singles found searching through boot sales and charity shops over the years. In amongst the pile I found some singles that would be worth a mint if they were in a half decent condition (which they ain’t!) but discovered this classic rock-steady guitar instrumental from 1969. Not exactly hi-fidelity but a tune all the same!
Here’s how the wormery is doing that was started back in March. I check up on it a couple of times a week and pop in some chopped kitchen waste. When I lift the top off there’s usually flies a go-go and the stuff inside is not looking too healthy with mouldy old bread and the odd yellow potato shoot but when I stuck my hand in today (urgh!) I noticed there were a good few worms wriggling about. Don’t have nightmares, and do sleep well (and don’t look too closely into the bucket)!
Yesterday I spent most of day sitting in a dentist’s chair having work done on me teeth as I’m a case presentation (aka “case prez”) for a dental student, so still feeling a bit shell-shocked from that combined with the heatwave we’re having here at the present so feeling a bit odd to say the least. I’m not really up for doing much in the garden tonight apart from watering the plants and having a butchers at what nature does best while sipping a cold bevvy from the comfort of a chair!
Anyway, here’s a couple of tunes to blast out in the garden this weekend while ‘tipping about’ with a hoe. Enjoy the old heatwave!
Thanks to Will for pointing us to the Lee Perry producers series mix on Test Pressing where this track was included. I hadn’t heard of this remix before, it’s excellent!
http://testpressing.org/2012/04/176-producers-series-17-lee-scratch-perry/
Yesterday I visited the friends of Horniman’s plant sale in Forest Hill. I got down there a quarter of an hour after it opened and I reckon I might have missed a few bargains as people were walking out with bagfuls of plants and there were a few bags stuck behind some stalls to pick up for “Ron” (later on).
Saying that, it wasn’t a bad sale, I got 4 Tomato plants (Gardener’s Delight) for £2 and 10 assorted Dahlias for £3, all very healthy looking with a little bit of root growth peeping out of the bottom of the pots. Good value or what? I also got a couple of houseplants, an Aloe vera for a pound and a medium sized Chinese Money plant (Pilea peperomioides) for a fiver.
The only down side was part of the sale was in their big glass conservatory. Not good considering the sun was beating down yesterday. I left after five minutes in there before the tempers got frayed, “What, you want three pounds for THAT?” “Plant sale rage” I can do without!
Also while buying the Tomato plants, someone told us a bonkers tip for deterring slugs. Put coffee grounds and crushed egg shells around your plants but also mix in some oat bran. The slugs go for it with gusto, go back to their lair to expand and explode. Not a very nice ending!
Old Bob Flowerdew was right, as soon as you produce some decent compost you can’t get enough of the blooming stuff! I’ve been helping myself to my second attempt of a compost heap for a good while now but today I filled up two barrow’s worth to mix in with some soil which I put in the second raised bed made with the scaffolding boards obtained free from our “Portuguese man with a van”. Owt for nowt for definite! If you can be bothered to collect up all your kitchen waste, turn it every now and again and wait a few months, it’s well worth doing for some top quality compost!
Great weather today so did a couple of hours, weeded around the salad bed and as it was root day, sowed some Carrots, Beetroot and Parsnip. If the weather keeps up I’ll do more tidying up and “tipping around with a hoe” tomorrow.
I’ve moved the portable cold frame (aka the old window frame I found in the street which stands on some old bricks from a skip) over a couple of Courgette and Squash seedlings to give them some protection and a bit of a head start.
I’m taking a risk with the Potatoes I moved the cold frame from as there’s still a good risk of frost, but I’ve covered them tonight with some horticultural fleece I’ve had kicking around since last year. Fingers crossed it won’t get too cold.
And I tell you what, I’m missing that “gloves in a bottle” stuff too!
This week’s post was written while listening to Friday’s Echo Beach on WLUW-FM Chicago with a great Pressure Sounds mix. http://archive.org/details/EchoBeachBroadcast05-11-12
A couple of things to pass on tonight, one is Scarlett’s “i-Grow” piece this month, about annuals and perennials. http://i-donline.com/2012/04/i-grow-annuals-and-perennials/
And the other is this week’s Ross Allen’s show on Strongroom Alive in interview with the great Tom Moulton. There’s some great tunes played on the show including Harold Melvin & The Bluenotes “The love I lost”, M.F.S.B’s “T.S.O.P” and Lou Rawls “You’ll never find another love like mine” amongst many others.
http://www.strongroomalive.com/2012/04/ross-allen-chats-to-tom-moulton/
Two good things for a Thursday night!
A big cheers to Will for telling us about the programme last night on BBC 6 Music with Terry Farley talking and selecting records with Andrew Weatherall as well as giving a potted history of London’s clubland. Some great tunes and some great stories and it’s up on the web for six more days if you fancy it.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01g9cdg
All the talk about youth cults and fanzines on the show brought me back to the time I produced my first fanzine many many moons ago. Here’s an excerpt from it; a letter I wrote to the local paper complaining about the latest youth cult at that time. I was appalled!
I had a dream on Easter Sunday morning involving a presenter from a 1970’s TV gardening show (whose name escapes me, if he ever really existed!) whose last words to me before waking were “indoor lawns really thrive”. I don’t know about indoor lawns thriving this bank holiday but indoor activities have, what with the dreadful weather here!
Most of the weekend was spent painting the hall but I did find the time to sow and pot on some seedlings indoors but nothing much outdoors apart from chucking some veg peelings into the compost heap and feeding the worms in the wormery.
I found another couple of pics of our back garden a couple of weeks after we first moved in on an older computer this weekend while I was looping some shortwave stuff for some new Madtone tunage. I had forgotten how bad it really was. And sometimes I’m a bit hard on myself and think I’ve let the back garden get a bit untidy…
A weekend fit for gardening or what? Here in the UK it was! Yesterday while thousands of others were sunning themselves crammed onto Brighton beach I was weeding in the back close to the house listening to the excellent slow-mo electonica of Andrew Weatherall on the red bull music academy site recorded in one of the pods of the London eye last year. Lovely stuff!
Things are starting to roll now in the garden and not forgetting the windowsill! There’s three pots of “cut and come again” cos lettuce mix ready to eat soon. The seeds cost me £2.35 and just add to that the price of a pot of compost, it’s cheap as chips to grow it yourself. As it was “leaf day” yesterday too, I took the chance with the weather and sowed outdoors two sorts of lettuce; artic king and little gem plus some spinach in a part of the garden that throughout the day will get some dappled shade which will stop the plants from bolting and going to seed early. If there’s any sign of frost I’ll stick some fleece or an old net curtain over the seedlings.
Today I did another couple of jobs in the garden, including making a very simple raised bed out of a couple of scaffolding boards given to us by the Portugese man with a van (an excellent bloke who does removals and house clearances at a decent rate, contact number on request!) who sometimes uses our garage combined with three end pieces found in a skip last weekend. Those with a couple of screws and voilà, a raised bed! Now I’ve got to give them a lick of weather protector when I do the fence next month and find some compost to fill them with.
I’m also in the process of “hardening off” some `sweet peas (I’ve jam jars on them at night which I take off during the daytime to get them used to the weather conditions outdoors as they were started off on the windowsill). I couldn’t find any bamboo canes to put in to support the plants when they grow taller, so used the prunings off the apple trees from early this year as a substitute. I knew there was a reason I kept them!
The Andrew Weatherall mix is here: http://redbullmusicacademyradio.com/shows/4555/
Weeds up to me knees 
