It’s been a hot weekend to say the least here in SE23!
Yesterday was spent at a local “Midsummer Fayre” in the searing heat but a great time was had by all. Between the Taekwondo demonstration, a brass band (playing renditions of Dancing Queen and Anarchy in the UK) and the eagerly awaited results to the prize rafffle, various plant and bric-a-brac stalls were visited. A few bargains were acquired; some plants, a couple of rugs for indoors and a foot high plastic mushroom (above) for a pound. A right bargain!
And as you know we are suckers for any plant that is subtitled “Rare” “Giant” or “Unusual” in seed listings and it looks like the giant Sunflower seeds we bought on ebay are coming true to their word. They’re at seven foot now and not stopping. We’ll keep you posted on how high they get.
And talking of Rupie Edwards’Ire Feelings here’s a couple of cuts of it, the second has a little bit of the tune Nite Owl from Tony Allen and the Champs and also later covered by Lee & The Clarendonians. More about that great piece of music from a post earlier this year here. It’s a small musical world. Keep cool and keep safe this week as it’s going to be a hot one!
A big thanks to Stevyn and Yukako Prothero for sending us pictures of their first journey into the world of gardening in Hokkaido, Japan. We know Stevyn from the excellent Iron Feather Journal fanzine (there’s loads about it here and here) and he was also behind the Towne Club RecordsAlan’s Psychedelic Breakfast remix project here which included a musical contribution from Madtone.
We at Weeds love a garden no matter its size or form and this is a neat little one. What makes it even better is that it’s the first time they’ve both had a go at growing stuff and in their own words with “little knowledge or experience.” That’s what’s gardening’s about, starting small, learning from any mistakes and see how you get on. You may get the odd failure but you’ll get successes too. Just being in the outdoors tinkering away with the many gardening jobs is healthy for a start and keeps your mind off the various lists and worries of the week.
The plot is compact “the earth is very rich, it’s excellent soil and get lots of sunshine and rain” says Stevyn. There’s a great mix of stuff growing including tomatoes, beans, peppers, zuchini, eggplants, shiso, carrots, lettuce, pumpkins, asparagus and onions! It’s right up our street.
He told us that the American orange pumpkins are rare compared to the green Japanese pumpkin and also jalapeno peppers are scarce over there too and cost a fortune.
As always we ask our contributors to pick a tune and Stevyn chose this one, a cover of a song from “a very touching sweet tv show about a man and two kids who live in a shack in Hokkaido trying to survive called Kita no kuni kara (From the North Country)”.
Also Stevyn sent us a pic of a rice paddy near his house “Many miles of rice paddys here, as the people eat rice daily” and how great is that scenery?
Also whilst we’re on the subject of Japan and gardens have a look here at a great garden they visited last year in Tomakomai. Here’s a sneak preview. A fun garden indeed!
Thanks again to Stevyn and Yukako for sending the great pics and we’d love to see more photo’s later on in the year to see how things develop!
Today’s been a mixed bag of weather again and it’s been sending the garden into madness, flowers are blooming everywhere. The scattered poppy seed have given us some great purple blooms dotted around the garden.
The courgette/zuchinni seed we bought off the web is now well and truly on its way and flowering and we’ve even had a water lily open up (below). We’re well chuffed but would appreciate less rain during the day (could it rain at night?) and more sun!
It’s all gone a bit bonkers in the garden here what with the good weather of late plus the combination of the rain we had a few weeks previous to that. The veg in the raised beds (above) are tearing away and the spuds are almost flowering.
We’ve let the grass go a bit wilder due to No Mow May and we’re beginning to like the idea. I think it’s the council gardening background made us a bit reticent to let the lawn grow more than a few inches. The only thing is now that we can’t see where our old cat leaves its “presents” so we have to go by smell and tread very carefully in the evening.
The pond is going great after the big pond liner change. The fish seem to like it and we’ve even got tadpoles in there now and we didn’t even spot any frogspawn beforehand. We were told many years ago by a workmate that down the Walworth Road one Sunday in the 1960’s “It rained frogs” (a report of raining frogs in Croydon here), perhaps it could’ve been raining tadpoles overnight in Forest Hill recently?
And the bed next to the new fence has come alive with new plants procured from the market, garden centre and seeds off ebay and friends. The comfrey plants that usually go mad have probably been checked when the fence went in so the comfrey feed has suffered so far but you never know as we’ve got a few months yet. But can you believe that it’s really June? We cant.
Whilst we’ve been writing this, the below was the musical background. One of the best music shows on the shortwaves!
KFOG takes to the high seas viaChannel 292 on Sunday June 20th 2021 at 1200 utc (1 pm UK time) and on Saturday June 26th at 0900 utc (10 am UK time) on 6070 kHz. Expect tunes in a nautical style and “see the glimmer from a distant lighthouse, as the buoys ding and the (radio) waves crash onto the rocky shore. This is music from the mist!” as they say at KFOG HQ.
Expect a mix from One Deck Pete called “A mix from across the Pond” with tunes from Kiyoko, Honeychild & DJ Olive, BOATS, Robert Mellin and The Congo’s. Grab yourself a lifejacket and a shortwave radio and tune in. If the shortwave radio is a problem tune in here at the alloted time. If you haven’t a lifejacket we’re sorry but we can’t help you with that!
It’s been a while since we’ve heard about our friend (and musical collaborator) Paul Greenstein‘s garden in Melbourne, Australia. He’s sent us over a few pics and news of what he’s up to now. For around a year he’s been keeping bees.
“We started with a ‘nucleus’ hive, which is a small box with 5 frames. We’ve now grown to 3 full-sized boxes (supers), although we’ve packed the bees down into 2 boxes for the winter. For the bees, it’s about staying warm. From the beekeeper’s perspective, you want to make it easy for them to stay nice and toasty, and not to have to worry about heating a lot of empty space. Kind of like downsizing your house to save on the bills, except they keep warm by vibrating their flight muscles while keeping their wings still. Amazing little creatures.
We haven’t harvested any honey this time around, preferring to let the bees keep it for food during winter, building up a strong hive. We live very near a creek (basically a river, but not a very big one) – and there’s loads of stuff for bees to forage. Lots of Eucalypt trees, although there’s a particular type of Eucalypt called Stringybark or Messmate, which for some reason makes bees angry. Maybe they don’t like the way it smells. Hopefully they’ll avoid those and we won’t get stung by grumpy foragers…”
He also mentioned the subject of the last but one post about cicadas from Justin Patrick Moore:
“We get incredibly loud cicadas here – in fact they’ve been known to drown out conversation! Apparently the version we have here are called Greengrocer Cicadas, and can go up to 120 dB – louder than an ACDC gig. Our cats occasionally get fed up and swat them with a paw – they’ll go silent in shock for a few seconds, then start up again.”
Below is a pic of a Bramley apple that he’s put in as “You can’t get decent cooking apples over here!” We do like a cooking apple here especially in a crumble with custard! Do have a look at older posts about his garden here here and here.
And here’s a couple from Paul’s musical output, a lovely garden related tune called “Rose” that has a lovely ambient feel to it and one with a Jah Wobble type vibe called “White Blinds“, excellent stuff indeed!
As it says on his soundcloud “Sometimes inwards is the only way to go.” He and the bees are 100% correct! Cheers for the pictures Paul and keep us updated with how things are getting on!
Here’s a post from our good radio, gardening and music friend across the pond Justin Patrick Moore about some bugs that are about in his back yard in Cincinnati at the moment. We’ve never even heard of them over here!
The seventeen year cicadas are at it again. This generation of periodical cicadas has been dubbed Brood X. The periodical cicadas have the latin name of Magicicada septendecim, and have a really interesting life cycle. In southwestern Ohio they are of the kind that come out every seventeen years. These insects spend around 99.5% of their long life underground as nymphs, feeding on fluids from tree roots in the eastern United States. In the spring of their 17th year the mature cicada emerges between late April and early June at a given locality, depending on temperature, and when they come out, they are usually in huge numbers. They’ve been creeping out of the ground slowly the past few weeks, but this past Saturday was the first day I saw a bunch of them. The temperature of the soil has to reach a certain temperature before they really start coming out of the ground, making little holes that they then emerge from. The soil has to get about 17.9 °C (64 °F) before they are ready to get busy with each other propagating a new brood which is what they will spend the next four to six weeks doing. To attract a mate the males of the species have to make a long sonorous drone, that gets louder in the neighborhood as more and more cicadas come out of the ground and start flying and flitting about. Mostly they like to hang out on trees. Apparently in the eastern U.S. where these little buggers live, billions are going to emerge. That’s a lot of cicadas.
This is the third time in my life that I’ve seen the cicada’s. The first time was when I was a kid in 1987. Unfortunately as a kid I was rather cruel to these little things. Hopefully I’ve already worked off the karma I generated by being mean to bugs. (Be nice to the cicadas as they don’t hurt nobody and help aerate the soil!) The next time was in 2004 and I made a recording of them to use in the drone & experimental ambient music I am so fond of. I still have the recording but don’t know if I ever actually made a track with the sounds. That first time around too, there was a local pizzeria called Snappy Tomato Pizza. They made a jingle for Snappy Cicada Pizza that has stuck in my head ever since I heard it. They had a promotion that if anyone came in and ate a cicada they’d get a free pizza. Apparently they also had them to use as a pizza topping – but I think that was just part of their marketing ploy that has now become local folklore. Hear the jingle here.
According to a story I saw on NPR some of these cicadas are going to go into a sexual hyperdrive caused by a fungus that is similar to ones found in psychedelic mushrooms. It’s a trippy time of year over here! From: https://www.npr.org/2021/05/18/997998920/the-fungus-thats-making-cicadas-sex-crazy ( It’s so weird!) “Kasson, who has been studying Massospora for about five years, says just before the cicadas rise from the ground, the spores of the fungus start to infect the bug. Once it’s above ground and starts to shed its skin to become an adult, its butt falls off. Then a “white plug of fungus” starts to grow in its place.
A “white plug of fungus” seen in cicadas infected by Massospora. Matt Kasson “It looks as if the backside of the cicada is being replaced either by chalk or by like one of those nubby middle school erasers,” Kasson says.
The insects have no idea what’s happening. The fungus, however, is “pulling the strings” and making the cicadas want to mate with everyone.
Males that are infected will continue to mate with females, but they’ll also pretend to be females so they can spread the fungus to even more partners.
“It’s sexually transmissible,” Kasson tells NPR. “It’s a failed mating attempt, of course, because there’s no genitalia back there.”
The fungus causes different reactions in different types of cicadas. Periodical cicadas, which take more than a decade between appearances, get sex crazy from cathinone. In yearly cicadas, the fungus makes them instead become hypersexual from psilocybin — the same chemical found in psychedelic mushrooms. Kasson estimates Massospora probably infects fewer than 5% of cicadas. And as far as he knows, the bugs are not in any pain.
“Everybody’s having a good time while they’re infected,” he says. “So I don’t imagine there’s much pain — maybe a desire to listen to the Grateful Dead or something like that, but no pain.”
Cicada exoskeletons on lavender
Thanks very much Justin for the interesting piece and he also mentions to have a look at a blog post from a nature sound recordist in Ohio about the sounds the Cicadas make… and there’s lots of pictures. Have a look and listen here.
It’s been a bit of doom and gloom for the last few posts what with the bad weather so here’s a couple of uplifting things seen this morning. Firstly the first poppy of the season opening up, it may be small but it’s a lovely red!
And this little seedling (below) will hopefully will be supplying us with some purple srouting broccoli if all goes well. Roll on full days of sunshine eh?
Here’s some pictures to convey how bad the weather was yesterday around 5pm in London town. It started as a downpour, then heavier rain and then mad hail! To say it was chucking it down was an understatement. A fast flowing stream appearing under the back gate from the drive and then the hail built up at the start of the lawn and it’s still there now.
Watch those seedlings. We may not be having frosty nights but heavy rain and hail can be a pain. One good thing with all of this rain is that the pond is filling up. That makes a change!
We spent another couple of hours yesterday “tipping around with a hoe” as they used to say at the council and sorting out what’s what, now the new fence is in. As we cleared the side bed the day before we now can see what can go where.
At the bed at the bottom of the garden (pic above top) are a couple of cardoons that are now on their third year now after getting them originally from Shannon’s knowing nothing too much about the plant. I mean we don’t now that much about them now apart from the plants soar up to seven feet high and their thistle-like flowers attract bees and all sorts of pollinators in droves.
There’s also a globe artichoke next to the cardoonswhich we obtained after doing a swap with a mate at a local community garden for some egyptian walking onionbulbs (another “out there” plant). We’ll keep you posted on how they get on this year but do have a look at getting a cardoon or two if you fancy a bonkers looking plant!
Weeds up to me knees 