Last weekend I uploaded some Steroid Abuse flyers and my old fanzine Ded Yampy from many moons ago to the blog so they’re up on the web for prosperity. Have a butchers at “Fanzines, flyers and flymo’s” and also the updated “The man and his music”. Roll on the good weather so I can get out in the garden or the next posts will feature the contents of my loft!
Lion Babe – Treat me like fire
Here’s a piece of lovely R&B tuneage been put through the lo-fi filter. An excellent tune played to death on Gilles P’s show. Lovely!
I saw a council worker giving a lawn it’s first cut of the year on Friday. Alright, it was tipping it down and he was wearing a balaclava, thick wooly gloves, a cossack’s hat and had a big coat on but he was cutting grass all the same. I reckon spring has nearly sprung!
The other day I was chatting to a maintenance chap at work who told us a great tip, he uses empty containers from office water fountain as cloches. All he does is saws the bottom (the wider end) off and then sticks them over his tomatoes and potatoes thus giving them an early start. How good is that?
Now if you are sensitive to plant container-abuse please look away now.
The above is a very shocking example, the smart looking container in the NCP car park in Covent Garden which was looking well neglected anyway now has some plastic plants hoofed in it. How crap is that? Gardeners in that area if you have some spare plants free, you know where you can stick a few. Plastic fantastic? I don’t think so!
Now finally on a brighter note, is news of an excellent seed offer passed onto us by our good mate Paul Walker (nice one Paul!). A herb or salad leaf seed bundle for £2, brilliant. In the salad leaf bundle you get 14 packs of seeds, growing bag and book and in the herb and vegetable one, 11 packs with the bag and book. The herb one has a few different varieties of Basil including Lemon, Lime, Sweet Genovese and Cinnamon. Looks well worth it! Click here for the offer. I think you can have one of each per household. Big up the spring and cheap seeds!
Here’s a bonkers little number played on the Rob Da Bank show last weekend. A nice bit of deep squelchy breakage with hints of the mighty Depth Charge. A tune, I reckon!
There’s a brill offer at Shannon’s Garden Centre in Forest Hill at the moment, they’re doing five herb plants for a fiver, that’s good isn’t it? It’s a great place, well stocked and the staff are always eager to help.
I was around there as soon as I found out about the offer and for my fiver I got a Mint (I needed some leaves for a kebab recipe that afternoon and there was none in our garden, far too cold!), Coriander, Lavender, Rosemary and the very odd Tree Onion (aka Egyptian Onion.) If you’re around the Forest Hill locality and want to take up the offer click here for the form to claim your herbal discount!
Here’s an old tune that came to mind out the blue this morning, a lovely number from the late great Hortense Ellis (sister of Alton Ellis another reggae great) “Unexpected Places”. I thought this was written by Jose Feliciano but turns out it was penned by Kim “Dickie Davies Eye’s” Carnes. Well I never! (Said in a husky female Rod Stewart type voice.)
It’s been too cold this week to do any gardening but the Sunday before last I cleared out one of the compost bins (supplied free from Lewisham Council) and got three barrows worth of rich looking humus. Over the last year I’ve tried to be very careful what I put in the bin but I still found a blue biro, gardening wire, green plastic plant tags, chocolate wrappers and a couple of crisp packets! I have now a old plant pot down there as a rubbish container for those “I can’t see a bin so I’ll hoof it in with the compost when no one’s looking” moments!
I spread the muck over a couple of beds where this year I’ll be be sticking in vegetables that’ll benefit from the richness of the soil like potatoes and courgettes. I also have to consider what’s been in the beds previously as you can’t have the same (or related) plants growing in the same area year after year. If so the plants would will drain nutrients making the soil unbalanced, and also leave it open to pests and diseases which in turn would infect the plants. You use something called crop rotation to counteract this, which is in it’s simplest form is putting vegetables into specific groups and rotating these groups one season after another in your plot/beds. More on crop rotation to come.
Also this week while bringing one of our cats to the vets in New Cross I passed a woman struggling with two very large plastic plant pots (nearly 4 foot wide and probably the same height) on a crossbar of a pushbike. It turns out the pots were being thrown out on a building site. She told me she was going to use them for spuds, but if you saw the size of them a couple of small fruit trees would fit in them!
Do remember those free seed tokens in the Daily Mirror this week. I’ll be bribing roadsweepers, newsagents and train cleaners to try and get some extra tokens. Keep em peeled!
I’ve just seen an advert on the telly about the Daily Mirror’s free seed offer which starts tomorrow. All you have to do is send one token from the newspaper per packet plus some cash to cover the postage. They have a selection from a wide variety of seeds including herbs, flowers and vegetables, not bad for a price of a paper eh? The seeds you get probably haven’t got the exotic packaging like the russian perennial pea I got off ebay the other day (above) but I reckon they have more seeds per pack than the eight I got in mine!
Keep those eyes peeled for a copy of a discarded Daily Mirror on the train and bus to and from work next week. Me, I’ll be scouring those empty carriages!
A lovely chilled out drifter of a tune heard on Laurent Garnier’s excellent “It is what it is” radio show (number 24, 9th February 2013). In fact all of the show is worth listening to!
I opened the compost bin I started just over a year ago this morning and it is looking mighty fine! The kitchen/plant waste has near enough rotted except for a few eggshells and the odd large potato. I’ve made a mental note to cut up the kitchen waste finer and to crush the eggshells even more from now on. If you look closely at the contents you’ll also see a nice blue biro. How the hell did that get in there? How long will that take to rot do you think?
Rereading Jane Perrone’s book this week I could really relate to the section about making compost where she writes “I’ve been known to secrete used tea bags in my pocket to take back for my own ever-hungry compost pile.” Tea bags never get wasted in our house, after a brew they either get chucked on the compost heap or the worms have them.
Talking about worms here’s how the wormery is progressing in the garage. It’s taken a lot longer than I thought (I started it early last summer) but I’ve got a big jar of liquid plant feed out of it and there’s also a good bit of compost underneath the rotting veg, sprouting onions, killer sized slugs and mouldy bread.
Also this week I started off some seeds on the kitchen windowsill, Cabbages (goldenacre) and Foxgloves (pam’s choice) and sometime soon will get those tomatoes seeds out of the packet. That’s good for me as I sowed them just after xmas last year. Patience dear boy!
Weeds up to me knees 