An excellent dub from Gregory Morris of Johnny Osbourne’s/Makka B‘s Cease Fire. A great tune for a sunny spring Saturday. And here’s the vocal.
It’s nice today but not nice enough for ice creams
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Category Archives: Tips for happy gardening
Weather report from the lakes
It’s been damp and overcast down here in SE23 today so the gardening we were planning to do was confined to repotting some seedlings indoors. Thanks to Rich R in the Lake District for letting us know about the weather up there. “Still some snow on the hill tops this week. Biting winds but lovely sun and it’s light until nearly 6.30pm.” Great stuff Rich and ta for the picture, we can’t wait for spring.
A canna lily in north London
Thanks to Debby H for getting in touch with a great picture of her canna lily and don’t it look grand!
She also let us know that she sowed the first of her cosmos seeds a couple of days ago and she’ll let us know when they start showing up. As she said “It’s a bit early to sow them, but it’s an experiment!” We are always up for gardening experiments here. Saying that most of our gardening experiences are experiments.
Well it looked smaller on the website
We popped to B&Q this morning to get a container for a newly aquired mimosa plant that we can’t decide where to actually put it in the garden. One in a pot may be good and can be moved around until we find the right spot. The pot was bigger than we thought!
First sowings of the year
We know we mentioned a couple of posts ago that you don’t want to be too keen on sowing seeds at this time of year, but we’ve started a couple off, seeing as both seeds need a few weeks to germinate.
This morning, we put 3 pots each of Reals Seeds Prairie Fire Mini Bush Chilli Pepper and Lemon Drop Hot Citrus Pepper in a heated seed tray. This year we’re using some B&Q bought Rocket Gro seed/cutting compost as the cheap supermarket shop-bought peat-free we bought a while ago just weren’t that good and we lost a load of seedings to the dreaded damping off.
On looking at the packets, the Prairie Fire takes 2-3 weeks to germinate and the Lemon Drop 3-4, now that’s a long wait. We will be training patience in this exercise and will keep you in the loop if we see any movement at all.
(Don’t) build me up buttercup
Big thanks to the horticultural team at Thompson & Morgan for their helpful advice following Jesse Yuen’s post the other day (here) about ongoing problems with Bermuda Buttercups (Oxalis pes-caprae*). It’s looks like a chemical weedkiller (which Jesse is not going to use) can’t rid a garden of them.
“Bermuda Buttercups are a plant that you may have to learn to garden with rather than against. Pulling up plants always leaves tiny bulbils behind that grow into new plants, it can also result in the spread of bulbils to new areas. These bulbils act as storage organs which are very persistent, lying dormant beneath cardboard or mulch for months, possibly years, so that as soon as the ground is exposed to light they re-emerge. Constant hoeing will help to deplete the bulbils, but again – it will take years for this to have any effect.”
“Even If you decide to use chemical weedkillers, timing of application is critical and you may have to do it more than once. You need to catch the plants just at the point before or on flowering. This is when the bulbils are exhausted of food whilst young bulbils are too small to survive. Not all plants will be at exactly the same stage so repeated applications for several years are required.”
Thanks again to all at Thompson & Morgan for imparting their knowledge about the plant that is giving our good dub gardening friend Jesse a headache at the moment.
*The specific epithet pes-caprae means ‘goat’s-foot’, possibly in reference to the shape of the leaf. (wikipedia)
We had joy, we had fun, we had a season in the sun
Last weekend we returned from a week away visiting some great East Sussex locations such as Camber Sands, Eastbourne and Brighton. Weather weren’t too bad (a bit of rain in the morning but usually sunny in the afternoon) but it has seemed to have changed when we got back home. Everything in the garden is now winding down, the tomatoes have their last fruit on them, the cosmos are still going (more on those later) and the giant sunflower (from seed bought off ebay) is doing great, following the sun as usual (more on that here).
We brought in the houseplants that were having a holiday outside, a chilli in a pot which will hopefully survive the winter and be back outside in the garden as they are technically perennials and even a couple of the pelargoniums taken from cuttings from the ones at the local train station. Why not? It’s nice to have a bit of the outside indoors.
Our north London correspondent Debby H has suggested we should get a page together of how people’s cosmos did this year and have a bit of a gallery going on and we think it’s a great idea. If the slugs got at your seedlings earlier on, don’t worry we will repeat it next year but any pictures of your cosmos to one deck pete (at) gee mail dot com please.
Also a massive shout and thanks to Jon Harris from the excellent multi-genre music show called Coughing Pigeon on Brum Radio here. On the 1st August show they played Madtone Safety Council V BiggaBush‘s Lock your bike at 01.15. The show continues in the usual unusual way with all sorts of great stuff from the dubby to this wonderful tune from Christie Laume called Rouge Rouge, wonderful stuff indeed.
As it says on the website “You should approach every Coughing Pigeon show with a degree of both certainty and curiosity about what you will hear. Household names feature alongside the relatively unknown in a quest to create a unique listening experience” and they are right!
A message from Crete
A big shout to Rich R who is on his holidays at the moment in Crete and found this rather nice flower called a sea daffodil (AKA white sand lily, amaryllis, lily of Knossos, beach saffron or beach crocus). It’s supposed to have a “pleasing, exotic and very subtle lily scent”. More about the plant here.
He also took some great pics of the sunset and the eclipse the other night (above and below). It looks like a magical place and “the beach we look out on is the actual one where Zorba the Greek (Anthony Quinn) did his dance”. Wow great stuff Rich, enjoy the rest of your holiday!
From the other side of the capital
A big thanks to Debby H for sending us some garden updates over the weekend. Above is of the cosmos that is now coming into flower and will hopefully give a good show over the next few weeks.
The daisies (above) are doing great and attracting butterflies and bees and the above picture includes a gatekeeper butterfly.
As Debby told us “We have 3 ornithogalum flowers coming. These grow up to about 2 metres in height!” Here’s the link to what they looked like in September last year (here).
And above’s a picture of one of her dwarf sunflowers that has opened (it looks much better than our giant ones that went up to about 3 foot and had a small flower then just withered away) and (below) her first Capri Red Pepper. Excellent stuff Debby!
Radio connects us all
Cheers to Kit, G0JPS presently on a boat on the Grand Union Canal who told us earlier he was listening to the “Alt Universe Top 40” on 9670 kHz on his XHDATA D-808 portable. As he reported: “Lovely reception. Hot Butter’s seminal track, “Popcorn” is currently playing.” Brilliant stuff Kit!
Then around the same time we heard from Debby H who picked up a couple of pepper plants from a few streets away (there was a mixture of plants on a wall with a sign “please take me” on it) and guess what one of the varieties was called? Marconi Red. Radio (and gardening) connects us all!
Weeds up to me knees 