Smells like teen spirit? No.

We here at Weeds swear by comfrey liquid used as a plant feed. Ours is made well out of the way at the bottom of the garden in a 1980’s Boots homebrew fermenting bin. A good few handfuls of the leaves of the plant are chucked in the bin alongside a few of borage and nettle and are left to rot in a small amount of water for a good few weeks weighed down with a housebrick, talk about simplicity!

It’s a brilliant feed used well diluted but what of the pong you may ask? Comments heard the last few times we’ve used it have ranged from “that smell is blxxdy awful!” to “that’s worse than the wiff of a thousand dirty ashtrays” to “urgghhh, that reminds me of body odour off a sweaty armpit stuck in your face on a tube at rush hour times ten”. Never mind the niff, it’s brilliant stuff, it’s cheap and works wonders! #comfreyliquidforever #comfreyplantfeediswhereitsat More comfrey info here.

More from the seed trials

Here’s an update to the seed trials we’re doing for Thompson & Morgan in the Weeds back garden. The most suprising thing to come up are the tropaeolums (nasturtiums), we’ve lots of self-seeded normal orange types going nuts at the bottom of the garden (below) but look at the pinkish/purple ones from T&M above, how good are they? We’re loving the colour of them and funnily enough nasturtiums normally don’t do that much for us here.

The spaghetti squash that is in the top bed is now making a break for it (below). Hopefully they’ll be more room when the broad beans beside it dies off. The squash is looking healthy and just started to flower. We’ve neglected feeding all the plants for a couple of weeks as the home-made comfrey liquid ran out (we gave Honor Oak Train Station a couple of bottles of it to help them with their station in bloom contest entry!), but we’ve now a new batch on the go. There’s another spaghetti squash at the bottom we sowed late but who knows the summer may go on for a bit longer this year.

The tomatoes (below) are in a bed which once used to house a greenhouse, the soil is not great there and doesn’t get the sun until mid afternoon and not for that long but the three plants there are surviving and there’s at least one truss of flowers showing. We won’t give up on them and we’ll be on it with the comfrey feed this weekend. Cheers again to T&M for the seeds!

On a T’ai Chi tip

If you’re in the Honor Oak Park area in London next Sunday (21st July) and fancy a bit of Tai Chi, there’s a great event going on from 11-4pm with a seminar from Rose Oliver over at the moment from Shanghai. It costs £40 and will be covering a whole lot of stuff suitable for anyone interested in Tai Chi, beginners or experienced practitioners. Her seminars are good fun and you’ll certainly come away with a bit more knowledge of the art and a couple of more friends. Contact Rose by email roseinchina2006@yahoo.co.uk to prebook or visit the Honor Oak Tai Chi Facebook page here. #SE23taichi #roseolivertaichi

It’s (not) just the same old show on my radio

Big thanks to DJ Frederick for including Weeds’ One Deck Pete’s Sounds of the shortwave at 15.38 minutes in on today’s broadcast of Free Radio Skybird “Music and culture for shortwave listening”. It also features Madtone’s Interval Signal Jazz as their actual interval signal. We’re glad to be part of the FRS crew!

Above is Sounds of the shortwave via the shortwaves with all the radio wave action! #freeradioskybird #shortwavesnotdead

Don’t step on the cracks

A trip down the garden path tonight produced this trio of pics. Above: The fiver’s worth of water lily we bought from the Lewisham pet shop (whose website’s by-line is “For all your reptile needs”) a few years ago has gone mad this summer. We counted nearly 7 flowers on it the other day. The fish are using it as shade during the sunny periods and the tadpoles as mini swimming pools. The pond need a bit of thinning out this weekend as it would be nice to give the inhabitants more room. We now get our fish food via ebay, and you get double or treble of the volume of food for the price compared to what you get in those supermarket tubs.

The pink flowers shown above don’t look like much and as a plant it’s a bit on the scrappy side but disregard that and grow night scented stock for it’s evening smell!

And somewhere in the middle of the tomatoes and broad beans growing against the garage wall and the dahlias is the Thompson & Morgan trial spaghetti squash. We reckon it’ll outgrow the space in no time!

And finally a dubbed out one for the warm night we’ll be getting tonight (where it’ll be hard to sleep even with the windows are open!), it’s from Masis called Unearthed Dub  and it’s the Frenk Dublin mix. Tune!

Free Radio Skybird flies again

DJ Frederick’s Free Radio Skybird returns to the 49 metre band next Sunday July 7th 2019 via http://www.channel292.de/ on 6070 kHz at 1400 UTC (1500 UK time). With a mixture of features and music (anything from jazz, avant-garde, ambient, folk, rock, indie and more) the hour transmission will also include One Deck Pete’s “Sounds of the shortwave” a ten minute shortwave radio inspired mix including tracks from Aljosha Konstanty (AK), Jay-Jay Johanson, Jazz’min Tutum and Rephazer. Tune in just after Gardener’s Question Time! #freeradioskybird

Saturday stag night fun

A few weeks ago a couple of the Weeds team went on a bat walk around Camberwell New Cemetery which was great fun. It’s not every Friday night you can wander around in the dark in your local cemetery carrying bat detectors.

On the night we were told if we wanted to encourage more wildlife including stag beetles into our garden we’d have to keep some wood piles and have the odd rotting stump lying about. Well we heeded the expert advice and have been visited a few times by the friendly stag beetle (here’s one from tonight). When these things take off it reminds us of a heavily fortified military vehicle. Bonkers!

Back yard reportage 2

A big thanks again to Thompson & Morgan blog (have a look as it’s interesting stuff with tons of hints and tips!) for sending us some seeds to trial this year and this is how they’re doing in July! They are all watered on a daily basis and have a comfrey feed weekly.

The above is the spinach (in the front pot) which was started off on the kitchen windowsill and a couple of the seedlings were transferred outside but here’s the pot with two left in them. They haven’t gone to seed yet and are doing well!

The daft idea we had to stick a row of the lettuce and spinach in the area shaded by some broad beans (so they didn’t bolt) may have not been a good one but here’s what’s going on so far! We won’t even mention the idea of sowing lettuce in the gully between the earthed up potatoes as nothing has germinated there.

The spaghetti squash is coming on a treat and we reckon we may have put it in the wrong place but “Hey! it’s an experiment”. The other squash that had lots of space to run free has been decimated by the slugs so this is the only one at the moment!

And as the song goes “Where have all the zinnia’s gone?” We don’t know what we done wrong but there’s no sign of any zinnia’s yet. Damn! But the tomatoes and sunflowers seem to be doing well and we eagerly look forward to seeing what variety they morph into! Ta again T&M, there will be updates!

Back yard reportage 1

A belated Happy Solstice to one and all! It was a shame we couldn’t get Ken Barlow, Jamie Reid or Arthur Pendragon (they were busy elsewhere) in our garden first thing yesterday to give the plants added help with a blessing or two but we have the next best thing, a bucket of home-made Comfrey Liquid (with added borage and nettle leaves) ponging away nicely!

It’s been such a boost (we use it diluted, 10 parts water to every 1 part of the dark stinky liquid on a weekly basis) all over the garden especially the various poppies that are coming up now after we used the “throw em randomly and see” method of distribution from seeds obtained from Shannon’s, ebay or off a seed swap or two. A few years ago we were into how many types of mint we could find, now we’ve moved onto poppies!

We mention Comfrey liquid, yesterday we passed on a bottle of the said pongy stuff to Honor Oak Park train station to add some weight to their entry in the annual “Station in bloom” contest. We gave them an accompanying set of instructions ‘Warning this stuff smells (think of  body odour and times it by twenty), apply once a week diluted 10 to 1 very early in the morning or you will lose customers!” Best of luck to them!