After all the comments about how bad this summer has been, it looks as the weather has listened and now changing to some super warmth over the next few days and to celebrate here’s a lovely tune from Augustus Pablo/Enos McCloud.
To paraphase the man like Shaw Taylor on Police Five, “Keep ’em peeled”. In this day and age people chuck out stuff with a view to someone else using it, “recycling” is what they call it. From old vacuum cleaners to 1990’s inkjet printers, people are leaving stuff out on garden walls, skips and next to rubbish bins everywhere for other people to take advantage of (if you can find the right inner bag and plug socket for the vacuum cleaner or suss out that major fault with the printer).
You can be lucky though, like we were the other day. On our daily excercise stroll we saw a few Iceland bags full of neatly pruned Irises with lovely cleaned roots that looked like they had been washed. Of course we took a bag, and why not?
A lovely space in our garden was made for them by pulling up some lemon balm by the tree that has other Irises beside them and then given a good water. Not bad for free eh? Meanwhile we have a multimeter with testing leads on the printer and still can’t find the fault. Stick to gardening freebies!
This weekend we sampled our first potato harvest after putting the Maris Piper seed spuds in the garden back in the March here. We made sure to forgot all about them this year as we usually are looking to see if the potatoes are forming not long after the plant flowers.
Even when we were being very careful with the garden fork we still punctured a few and brought up the odd green spud. Now that’s something you don’t want to ingest, the same being for the strange tomato-like fruit that sometimes form after the plant flowers. Don’t go anywhere near them!
On our travels today we found some great looking plant markers on a couple of tree seedlings around Devonshire Road SE23. They look great, very graphic. Love the baby oak one!
Thanks again to Justin Patrick Moore, this time for letting us know about this great track. Sounding like a send up of the Lincolnshire Poacher number station the wonderfully named Shropshire Number Stations brings you The Minsterley Tumbler and it’s good fun. We do hope that this doesn’t start a trend of happy sounding tunes sampling/parodying number stations as it’s all doom and gloom and the end of the world on shortwave, ain’t it?
Here’s another track that isn’t getting all serious on us when it comes to sampling off shortwave. Ax Martz brings us the upbeat Mensaje en código (Coded message).
If you do some bass heavy tripped out ravey number stations vibes, this is a good one. RAVEDEATH1993 with Number Station Dub.
00000. End of message end of transmission. Enjoy your weekend (said in a monotone robotic voice of course).
It’s going absolutely crazy in the vegetable patch at Justin Patrick Moore‘s back yard in Cincinnati. Our good friend from across the pond and author of the fine book The Radio Phonics Laboratory (out now from the Peckham based Velocity Press here) has sent us some pictures of his vegetable plot. Look at the monster zuchinni plants (above) and the present harvest (below).
And as for the green beans and the corn (and the current harvest in the fridge) look at the below. It’s funny as our zuchinni (AKA courgette or baby marrow over here) and green beans didn’t get past germination stage or if they did, the “no holds barred” Forest Hill slugs had them.
Usually with zuchinni/courgettes we have a glut and there’s only so much you can do with them. There are ways around that glut though, we’ve tried this chocolate courgette cake here and here’s a great idea from Justin’s wife Audrey.
An open sandwich called Yvonne.
Put sauteed mushrooms, tomatoes, zucchini, and spinach, black olives if you like them, seasoned with garlic, pepper, basil and melted swiss cheese on top that you ladle over toasted bread. Add a splash of soy sauce to your taste. Sounds great for those zuchinni gluts and your own gut too.
And (above) look at this for a self-seeding/volunteer zuchinni in his garden too! What went on with our seedlings I wonder and usually our normal plants don’t even get as big as this.
And as for a tune, Justin picked this one from Tim Curry funnily enough called The zucchini song. Cheers again for the pics and recipe idea Justin and here’s more on his great book here:
Last year we swapped a comfrey plant and got in exchange some chilli peppers, one being the apache variety (above). Last autumn we remembered what our friend DJ Phil Harmony from Berlin once said, that chillies are perenials as in they’ll keep going if they’re kept out of the frost/winter.
And below is the plant this year that’s kept on the kitchen windowsill. Do bring them in over the winter, they won’t look they are doing much but they’ll reward you again and again! Look at the amount of chillies we have on it and warning, apache is a hot one!
We’re always up for a bargain here at Weeds and a few weeks ago we found this great looking geranium (above) on the plant stall in a local summer sale in a church hall in Hither Green. The stall was sandwiched between a retailer of hand-made baby clothes and a vendor of grape juice from that famous grape growing region called New Cross. The geranium cost us the whopping sum of a fiver but we were happy with that as it really has come on a treat. Strange flowers as well.
This weekend we were at a local park for their annual festival. Earlier in the morning someone mentioned in reply to the horrible weather forecast for the day that “they” could be wrong, “I mean remember Michael Fish got it wrong in 1987?”, sadly “they” weren’t. It turned out to be a right washout but the sun did come out an hour before the festival was meant to close but by then it was far too late, sadly.
There was a upside to the downbeat day though when we obtained some 4 small tomato plants for £2.50 from a stall ran by the local allotment society which we didn’t notice until right at the end. Pic above: you can see the plants are pretty small in relation to the big tomato plant at the rear and the chilli pepper next to it and it is July now but you never know what may happen especially with this strange weather we’ve been having.
The comfrey liquid will be applied, a few prayers said and we’ll see. Let’s raise a glass of grape juice (preferably New Cross Nouveau) for more bargains!
Cheers to Wlad (US7IGN) in Kyiv for sending us some pictures a fortnight or so which we’ve only got around to posting now. The first is how his good mate Sergiy (UT3UFD)‘s indoor banana plant is doing (above) and as you can it’s looking healthy! Love to know how his date palm is getting on.
And here’s a nice picture of how Wlad’s Dill and Potatoes make a good combination in the same container. We’ve sowed some Dill here a few years ago and actually got it to grow but didn’t really do anything with it sadly as we weren’t into the herb at the time but the Dill above is looking healthy. More on how to grow Dill here. Cheers for the pictures Wlad.
On Sunday 7th July 2024 at 0900/1300 hrs UTC on 6160 kHz and then at 2000 UTC on 6160 kHz and 3975 kHz the Imaginary Stations crew will be bringing you COOL 2 via the services of Shortwave Gold.
Expect entertainment of the summer vacation kind via the ionosphere. They’ll be a live BBQ in the studio with running commentary (plus amateur firefighter), a specialist towel folder to give you tips on how to place your towel on the sunlounger when reserving premier poolside seats, alongside some summer tunes. There’s a mix from our very own galloping gardener One Deck Pete with “A 7 inch single summer special” at 4 mins in featuring Earl Brown, Stereolab, Freda Payne, Anthony Johnson and Martel Robinson. So roll out the beach blanket, blow up that beach ball and get yourself comfy and tune into COOL 2.
Then via WRMI on Wednesday 10th July 2024 at 0200 UTC on 9395 kHz there’ll be the debut show of COOL which was broadcast to Europe the other week which we posted about here. Tune in and enjoy the “summer of shortwave” vibes.
Here’s the studio audio of Imaginary Station’s COOL from Sunday 30th June 2024 transmitted by Shortwave Gold to Europe via shortwave. The programme features cool tunes for this summer of ours (even though it’s been a bit grey here today) featuring DJ Frederick and Justin Patrick Moore.
At 3.47 in there’s a mix by One Deck Pete called “Summertime and the living is easy”. Here’s the tracklistings:
Jimi Tenor with Cold Diamond & Mink – Gaia Sunset, Part 1
Glass Beams – Mahal
Augustus Pablo – Satta Dub
Chancha via Circuito – La Victoria ft Lido Pimienta & Manu Ranks
Get some suntan lotion on and enjoy the sunshine!
Weeds up to me knees 