Here’s a super guest mix from The Go! Team from last week’s excellent Tom Ravenscroft show on BBC Radio 6 music. A mix of all sorts of madness!
One to play very loud in the greenhouse late at night while repotting plants (with just a torch as a light source) especially when there’s a full moon. That’ll get the neighbours talking! The mix is available here.
A big thanks to the weather for the weekend just gone and it looks like spring has finally sprung! Things are certainly on their way, I’ve got some healthy looking leek seedlings, black poppies and garlic in the glass terrarium I found in the street a couple of years ago (above) and the bulbs are starting to come up in the found empty champagne case too (below).
Early Sunday morning I popped into Shannon’s (ta to Paul, Araba and Alexi for the lift) and got myself three bags of multi-purpose compost to put into the new raised bed (below) made out of a couple of free scaffolding boards procured from Paul a couple of weeks earlier. So thanks to a cheap argos drill, some spare wood and a quarter of a tin of fence protector left over from last year, it’s now a home for beetroot, carrots and climbing french beans. And look at the runner bean cane wigwam, that’s been put in a bit early!
And here’s a tune dedicated to all who put in a few hours over the weekend with their mowers, garden forks, spades, trowels and (new pair of) loppers while enjoying the good weather in their gardens and allotments! Roll on the spring!
Damian Marley – Hard Work (Dedicated to all Westminster City Council gardeners)
The London Garden Book A-Z – Abigail Willis – Metro
I popped into Charing Cross library last week and between playing “spot the sleeping person” and the “where’s the spare chair?”, I came across this great book in the gardening section.
It’s an interesting read about gardens around the capital circa 2012. It’s been well researched and features everything from Kew, The Barbican Conservatory, beekeeping on top of The Royal Festival Hall to lesser known gardens like Roots and Shoots (where I did an introduction to beekeeping course with the LBKA a few years ago), The Food From The Sky growing project on top of a supermarket in Crouch End (sadly no more), Mark from Vertical Veg (who’s also well into his music), the Horniman Museum and Gardens (up the road from us who have a great annual plant sale) and even a traffic island in E9 that went to pot but now been planted out in a guerrilla gardening style, a great Zen garden in Acton and a whole lot more. Even Shannon’s our local garden centre is mentioned in it. What more do you want?
A great book documenting gardens in the capital from the big to the small!
And talking of the capital…
Last night I popped into Lidl and got a right old bargain, a pair of expandable loppers for £7.99. How good is that? I’ve always wanted a pair but never got round to getting some until now.
What was funny though, was when the chap on the checkout saw them he made a big thing out of it, pulling them apart and posing with them like it was a bullworker from the 1970’s, much to the annoyance of the twenty people behind me in the queue. Very odd!
He then said to us very matter-of-factly, “Do keep your receipt Sir, and remember you do have up to fourteen days to bring them back if they break.” Does he know something I don’t?
I heard this classic Dennis Brown tune today on soundcloud, off a recording of a dance with Saxon soundsytem and David Rodigan from the mid 1980’s and what a tune! That led me to recall a lovely recut of it by Wayne Wade from around 1978.
If you love the rhythm as much as I do, listen to the below mix and a half from the excellent Algoriddim which features cut after cut after cut, starting with the great Alton Ellis and featuring a personal favourite of mine, Z90 Skank by Trinity.
Some tunes to chill out to and dream of some good weather soon, so you can go out and tip around in the garden.
A big shout to our good friend Phil Harmony in Berlin who produces the excellent dub night radio show. Last year we featured his great balcony garden in our “dub gardeners of the world unite” feature here.
This winter Phil brought in his Jolokia Chocolate Chilli plant and here’s a couple of pics of the state of play at the moment. I always thought Chillies were annuals but it was only last year when I was in Shannon’s Garden Centre and they showed us a couple of plants they kept indoors over the winter that I found out they’re short-lived perennials given the right conditions. Over the winter months the plant goes into hibernation mode and can look like it’s a goner but come the spring once the weather improves, the plant will begin to sprout new growth. 
There’s some great information about overwintering Chilli plants on the Dartmoor Chilli Farm website here and it mentions there that they’ve had good success overwintering the Jolokia variety.
Thanks to Phil for picking an excellent tune to accompany the pictures from Kabaka Pyramid ft. Protoje called Warrior. Tune!
Nice one Phil, do send us some more pics once the plant gets going.
A big thanks to Lewisham Gardens and Golightly Gardens for organising the great seed swap in Deptford yesterday. I got nearly everything from my wants list and there were loads of great seeds available. These events are always good for meeting fellow gardeners, getting growing advice and for picking up those odd varieties of seeds.
I got sunflowers, sweet peas, hollyhocks, poppies, foxgloves and gaillardia in the flower line. I wasn’t looking for too much veg as I’m happily sorted for those after getting a bargain of mixed veg seeds on ebay the other month.
I did get a couple of varieties of basil (bush and sweet genovese), french beans and a beefsteak tomato called Marmande which looked like it could be an extra from that silly 70’s film Attack of the Killer Tomatoes.
I was on my way out when I met a lovely chap who was looking for the seed swap who worked for Lewisham council. He told me later after a long shift at the council all he wants to do is spend the rest of his day up his allotment. Great stuff! Back in the seedswap he shared a wide variety of seeds (and I don’t even think he wanted anything in return as far as I can remember) and I got a tomato called Black Krim from Russia!
When I finally left I visited the new and improved Dig This Nursery in Clifton Rise, New Cross after being ribbed by Mihaly (who was doing a talk at the seed swap about growing veg in small spaces) for not being up to speed about knowing that their shop has moved. Sometimes I find it hard enough to keep up with what’s going in me own small world let alone outside it! They’ve even opened a new shop in Rye Lane in the parish of Peckham too.
In the New Cross shop is a second hand record section where I flicked through some old reggae singles (£3 each) where they had a copy of the late great Nicky Thomas tune Love of the Common People (to hear the original jamaican version without the strings click here). On the B side of that well-known single is the tune below which I was reminded about by The Rhythm Doctor when he span it at one of our events at Limewharf last year.
And thanks to the excellent Dancecrasher website (from The Tighten Up Crew) here’s the vocal version of the above from Slim Smith. Well I never knew that!
Thanks again to Lewiham Gardens and Golightly Gardens for this event. More seed swaps please!
I heard two great gardening tips this week. The first was from Penny Golightly (of the great Golightly Gardens website) who mentioned the free tomato seed offer from Heinz. It’s only a limited thing but have a look at their Facebook page here and see if you’re lucky!
Also on last week’s Gardening with Tim & Joe show on BBC Radio Leeds, Joe Maiden mentioned rather than buying a pack of seeds especially for pea shoots from the major seed sellers (around £2.50), go to the supermarket and buy a packet of dried peas which are the same thing and a whole lot cheaper!
I had a day off Thursday and managed to do a little bit of gardening before the rain came and it was so nice to be back out there. I cleared the bed next to the pond (Pic above – fish courtesy of Lewisham pet shop, bought a few years ago and they’ve multiplied a bit since then. God knows how they survive in a rusty old water tank!)
The reason I was out there was I bought a load of bluebells a fortnight ago which were bought “in the green” (as I missed the proper bulb planting time in the autumn) so when the postlady delivered them on Thursday morning they were live (with roots and shoots and all) so they had to go in. Let’s hope the birds or the squirrels don’t pull them up!
Things are on the move, the onion sets, garlic and parsley under the top half of the old kitchen door are starting to show signs of life and the tomato and pepper seeds I stuck in a few weeks ago indoors are on their way. It won’t be long now, roll on the warm weather!
I was off all last week with the dreaded lurgy and some lurgy it was! I had no interest in gardening plus no energy so apart from sorting out my seed tin for the seed swap this saturday, last week was a total write-off!
Yesterday I took another look at the onions that are supposedly stored in ideal conditions under the stairs which should have been put in in the autumn for overwintering. Oh dear!
And finally a quick reminder about the seed swap next Saturday in Deptford. It’s only a quid and you get three talks thrown in as well, so see you there! More details on twitter here.
It’s never t’wirly* here! A few days into the new year I stuck in some seeds (post here) and here’s how they are getting on nearly a month or so later. It’s all done on the cheap, (especially after the expense of christmas!) the propagator cost us £3.50 from shannon’s, the seeds were off ebay and the whole thing is stuck in the back room by the patio doors.
There’s some tomatoes on their way (tray on the left, front) and behind them, the peppers are starting to come through. Alright it’s been a month, but who cares as they won’t be able to go out till ages yet. The other seeds coming through in the pots are some lettuce leaf basil and some strawberries. The other two pots contain an odd one for me, alkanet, don’t ask me why but I’m giving it a go this year and also a chinese lantern (aka bladder cherry. what a good name!) More reports on those in the next few weeks.
And as for the seed potatoes from shannon’s (above), there’s signs of life! Keep on chitting on.
And to end on, here’s a happy sounding slice of tune-age from a few years ago with an apt forward-looking title (considering the weather of late) as heard on Tom Ravenscroft’s show the other week. It’s from Karriem Riggins called Summer Maddnes S.A. (Alone Together.) Roll on the spring!
*More on the cult of the twirly here.
Weeds up to me knees 