Category Archives: what will be will be

Dreams less sweet

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On Saturday afternoon after our Mystic Meg-like prophetic dream, the “vibes” (or more than likely the guilt) forced us out in the garden to do some tidying up. We only did a couple of hours but it was a pleasure to spend some time out the back.

We tidied up the patio and moved the carrots in the big pot we found in the street from the bottom of the garden up nearer the house. It’s all tops and does need thining out but there are baby carrots there and the decorative foilage ain’t bad. If anyone asks we’ll them they’re some sort of exotic microferns.

And we finally cleaned the leaves off the pond netting and gave it a good once over around it and it does make a difference to the look of it. With this weather God only knows when we’ll be able to get out there again though next Saturday is looking dry.

And finally we retrieved some beetroots, not many but enough to boil and to fill a small bowl and stick in the fridge to eat this week. Cheese and beetroot in a white bread sarnie, a treat you can’t beat!

And here’s a few random tunes for a Sunday evening.

 

 

Honey from down under

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Big shout to our good friend Paul Greenstein once of the East Dulwich parish, now of Melbourne, Australia (we’ve featured his garden a few times here, here and here) and also a Madtone musical collaborator as Audiovert.

If you remember, Paul keeps bees in his garden (above: a pic of his bees from a while ago) and he’s just recently had his first bumper crop of honey (below), extracting around 30 kilos and reckon they may be more as well. Great stuff Paul and thanks for letting us know about it, we imagine it’s very hard work but well worth it though.

With some of the honey he’s been making Mead (below), one with Seville orange, cloves, raisins and cinnamon and the other with Morello cherries. Sounds and looks tasty! We tried making Mead once with honey procured from a stall at Leather Lane market. The recipe said it will either taste heavenly or like battery acid. Ours tasted like the latter, we never made it again!

Paul makes some great tunes under the name Audiovert including this Madtone collab African Bass and his contribution to the Shortwave Transmissions project here. Thanks for getting in touch Paul!

Coming to the end of the road

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It’s cold and miserable out there and the garden is in a right state even though it looked a lot better earlier this year. The butternut squash (above) that was making a late start has fallen by the wayside and now looks a right mess.

In the forthcoming weeks there may be a day where it may be dry enough to give the lawn a cut and even give the beds a tidy over. Remember the more work you do now means less work come the spring and the garden will look a lot easier on the eye over the winter. Trouble is when the garden looks a bit ropey you have less chance of putting on those gardening boots but we will try as the wild bit at the bottom (above) does look a bit wild and look at the pond (below). The word neglect comes to our guilty gardening minds.

Got any ideas of what you’ll be growing next year? We’re now on the lookout for any seed swaps, seed bargains or plants on the cheap. If you know of anything as in cheap seeds or events do let us know and we’ll blog them up.

We can’t control the weather but we can control the music

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The above picture was the weather we had at the start of the week and by all accounts will return tomorrow. That’s all we need but the heating’s on at the moment and the stereo has been turned up high. The first tune of the night is Straight to Mad Professor’s head from the set Mad Professor meets Channel One: Round 2 by Mad Professor and Channel One. It is one subtle dub!

 

We heard a Hugh Mundell dubplate on this week’s excellent Rhythm Doctor’s Waiting Room on IDA Radio (Tallinn). While we were looking for it we found a great Augustus Pablo Dub of Feeling Alright.

 

And the best “out there” tune of the night is from a LP called Folk and Pop Sounds of Sumatra Vol.1 on the excellent Sublime Frequencies label from out of Seattle. No idea who it’s from or what it’s called, all it says on the notes is that it’s in the Sumatran Dangdut style. It has a hook that sounds like an interval signal from a numbers station which we can’t place, that is sometimes played on a rasping bagpipe sounding keyboard. The LP has a wonderful cover too, what more do you want? Wonderful stuff which will worm its way into your brain as it’s so catchy.

Let’s temporarily forget the crap weather and dark times and listen to some decent tunes to soothe, inspire us and give us a break so to speak.

A view from the front door

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Big thanks to Rich R in the Lake District for sending us a photo of Skiddaw (3054 feet) The snow has come a couple of weeks later than usual but it is there now (remember the last post from Rich here). Rich was saying it is quite a labourious walk of 3 hours to get to the peak with not many twists and turns but from the top you can see as far as Scotland across the Solway, The Isle of Man to the South and Northern Ireland to the west. Now that is one view!

And it looks like from the doorstep they get good night skies too. The top night picture has a tinge of the northern lights. Cheers for those Rich.

Proceed at all times with great caution

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Not exactly the finest weekend here at Weeds HQ. We had a burst water main that meant an addition of a micro-pond in the front garden so presently no running water and heating and to add to that a pair of glasses were lost on the P4 bus.

We did however have a little firework celebration earlier this evening with a pack of giant sparklers and a £14.99 box of fireworks from Lewisham Lldl. Obviously it weren’t as long a show as the fireworks they put on at The Thames for New Year’s Eve but they weren’t bad for the price either. We even burnt a fair bit of wood we cut down from the tree next door earlier this year (here). Musical accompliment to said firework display (unlike the ELO, Rolling Stones and Elton John they play on NYE) was provided by The Rhythm Doctor’s Waiting Room 23.10.2023 where he plays a fair few tracks from The Other Others LP. A fine show!

Whilst the fireworks were fireworking we were reminded of those public information films of the 1970’s where they used to try and frighten the living daylights out of you (and always used to go on about keeping the fireworks in a closed old biscuit tin). So to end this post here’s a few that are embedded in our consciousness. Have a good bonfire night!

GMT comes back again with a vengeance

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It’s November and things are definitely slowing down as the winter weather is now coming in thick and fast and so are the dark nights. No frosts as yet but lots of wind and rain. There’s still a few flowers in the back garden as well which is a nice suprise.

As for the butternut squash, it is still producing fruits and the big one has been dug into by something and is split in the middle. We won’t be eating that! There is no way we’ll get some warmth or sunshine to ripen them up sadly.

And as for the pond, if we have any more rain we’ll be bucketing some water out of it as it’s well close to the top now. Crazy weather we’re having!

Dubs of the day

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Thanks to our good mate Gerry Hectic who recommended this piece of dubwise this morning from Jay Glass Dubs from Anthens, Greece. It’s very gardening related too what with the name of Narcissus. Very nice.

And one from us on this sunny but cold day, a nice Jazz type dub vibe from New Zion Trio out of New York with a 9 minute version of Ras Michael and the Sons Of Negus’ None A Jah Jah Children Dub. Wow, what a tune.

 

Not another product withdrawal

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Yesterday we took a trip to Lldl to see if there were any “When it’s gone, it’s gone” bargains during this week’s special: “Flavour of the week: Eastern & Central Europe”. Alongside some wareniki and cherry jaffa cakes we bought another pack of Tulips. We did like the graphics at the top especially the “No knife and fork should be used to plant these bulbs” sign. Which got us thinking…

Years ago whilst waiting for a large bag of chicken breasts at the Butchers in Leather Lane EC1 we were told a silly tale from one of the market guys which went something like this: “A mate of mine was taken into hospital the other week as he had food poisoning” to which we replied “Sorry to hear that mate”. “Yeah he made himself a spaghetti bolognese and he didn’t have any onions so he cut up some tulip bulbs and used them instead” said the cockney bloke. “He’s okay, the doctors said he’ll be out in the spring”.

Have a good Sunday and enjoy the great weather today!

On a late summer tip

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We’ll be having a late summer this week the BBC has just informed us. For us gardeners that means more watering but hopefully will make the harvest “window” open for a lot longer than usual. We hope so, as the butternut squash plant (we assume it is) is setting more fruits and the one we have already is getting a little larger.

And as the sun is coming here’s a nice balearic tune to chill out called Un Placer Celestial (Reprise) from Tambores En Benirrasout of Barrow-in-Furness. Some nice summery vibes here.

And some summer themed reggae from Bobby Kalphat.

And one to play later in the evening as the sun goes down is an excellent bass heavy track from 2020 from Khotin called Finds you well. It’s on Khotin Industries out of Edmonton, Alberta.

Best of luck with the weather and have yourself sometime in the garden this weekend!