Reel out me hose…

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So spring has finally arrived! It’s now time to scrape the mould off those gardening gloves and that inch of dust from your kneeling pad. When you’re next out in the garden dangle a speaker out of the back window and play some tunes as we all know music and plants go well together.

The first recommendation is for all who love a certain brassica from Helsinki-based composer Jukio Kallio featuring some tinkling on the old Joanna. This’ll get those broad bean seeds a germinating!

The next is a lovely piece called Garden Dub for the tripped out gardener in us all from Pale Rider, a solo project featuring one half of the Nashville/New York dub duo Phase Selector Sound. Lovely stuff! Leave the top window open in the greenhouse so the treble can escape and float around the neighbourhood.

Tuesday’s shorts

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Things are moving on in the garden, the foxtail lily is starting to burst out the terrarium now (above pic) and it’ll be lifting the blimming thing off by the weekend!

A big thanks to Thompson & Morgan for including Weeds on their new public twitter list “Great grow your own blogs” here. It also includes The Propagator, Life on Pig Row, The Quest for Veg and more. A list to subscribe to!

Here’s a couple of great tunes heard this week, the first on this week’s Tom Ravenscroft show and the second a great tune by Lila Iké that samples Dennis Brown & Aswad’s Promised Land heard on (a new show to us called) Reggae Got Soul on BBC Coventry & Warwickshire. Roll on the sunshine that’s hopefully coming this weekend!

 

 

Shaw Taylor was never a sailor

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Found in front of Weeds HQ on St. Patrick’s day morning (below) this strange home-made hat stand/large cat scratcher is now in place in the garden for use later this season. What do you think we should have trained up it? A clematis, some sweet peas or runner beans perhaps? Let’s see how the mood takes us. To its left is the window frame we found years ago and to its right a mirror originally left out for the bin men. Isn’t it great what you find in the street?

 

Greenhouse classics (revived)

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Cheers for Justin Moore for starting us off again on the search for gardening related music with his recommendation for Mort Garsen‘s Cosmic LP “Mother Earth’s Plantasia” last week here. Also a big thanks to the good Dr Strangedub from The Echo Chamber on KFAI for his mix a few years ago below and Pete Haigh from the monthly Funkology radio show (on “On The Wire” on BBC Radio Lancashire) for his gardening-related chart here. We’re now looking for more. Know any deep house classics that mention “potting on”? Or some dubstep that mentions dephiniums? Or just some fine tunes you like to like to prune the roses to? Send us your nominations please. Remember music and gardening do mix!

Hell on wheels

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We discovered yesterday that the robo mower we saw in Lincoln’s Inn Fields hasn’t been made redundant or ran out of double A’s, it was just having a rest. As the sign says, ‘Lincoln’ works 24/7 in all weathers so there’s no overtime to be shelled out, wet money for working in the rain and there’s no threat of him taking a Monday off as a “sickie”.

We are angry and we will fight against this motorised enemy of the people. Plans are in progress for some home-made ramps, ski slaloms and road-cone zig-zags (to confuse ‘Lincoln’) to be put in the park under the cover of night. We cannot let these machines take over. Who’ll be doing the skiving when the humble council gardener and parkie are a thing of the past? Who’ll be wearing the Donkey Jacket? #Savethecouncilgardener

Journey through the secret life of plant pots

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A big shout to our good friend Justin Moore in Cincinnati for letting us know about this far out LP by Mort Garson (who sounds like an interesting fellow) called Mother Earth’s Plantasia from 1976 subtitled “Warm earth music for plants and the people who love them”. Any LP that has a track called “You don’t have to walk a Begonia” is alright by us. The LP originally came with a copy of “Mother Earth’s hassle-free indoor plant book” by Lynn & Joel Rapp too. What a bargain!

Turns out Mort’s earlier output was used as incidental music during the 1969 moon landing. I mean come on it had to be, if one of the participants was called Buzz Aldrin. Lock those greenhouse doors from the inside, tune in and drop out!

Robo mowers and radio hams

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Back in January (here) we mentioned that we saw a robo mower happily doing its job in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Whilst walking through said park today we saw it under a hedge in a right rejected state and it looked like it had been there a few days too (can robo mowers be made redundant?) We would’ve been tempted to put it in a bin bag and take it home but the promise of the pin-code alarm security put us right off! 

Also thanks to Jazz’min Tutum for putting this up on her Soundcloud this week, it’s a rough mix of a radio-inspired piece from Jazz’min & Madtone called This Frequency. It a track that goes out to all redundant robo mowers out there. Remember a robo mower is not just for christmas you know.

Under starter’s orders

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We popped into Shannon’s yesterday morning for some seed potatoes and more seed compost. It was great even though it was well grey outside to see it busy with gardeners ready at the starting blocks for the new season.

There’s more seeds to start off this weekend and we can pat ourselves on the back that it’s March and we are now just starting to thinking about sowing some tomatoes as we usually do that in January and at this time of year have a mountain of leggy tomato plants on the kitchen windowsill (above pic from a few years ago in March!)

Things are starting to wake up outside now, look at that foxtail lily go (above pic, please ignore the penicillin growing on the inside of the terrarium cloche).  And wherever you look in the Weeds HQ there’s always something gardening-related, I mean look at the dahlia tubers hiding under the bed, strange goings on indeed. It won’t be long now…