Thanks to Mike & Julia for sending some updated pics from their garden near Coventry. This time it’s cerise coloured sweet peas and pink poppies which were spurred into action with a bit of overnight midlands rain. They plants look like they loved those night showers.
And below are another few pictures from their Crete holiday. Cheers again for the ace pictures, Mike and Julia!
A big thanks to Debby H for sending us some pictures of what’s going on at the moment in the plant pots and flower beds in her north London garden. The ornithogalum above and below has started to produce more flowers and looks great.
The pictures of the cosmos (below) in her last post here influenced us to run out and get a plant for ourselves. It’s now in a pot and with its great flowers they’re a new favourite of ours here at Weeds.
The phlox and the sedum (below) are looking healthy too, unlike some of the plants in our garden. We’ve been doing a fair bit of watering here but there’s only so many times you can go up and down the garden with a watering can.
We stopped the hose a good few years ago after Gerry Hectic recommended a great episode of Gardeners’ World which was about conserving water which shamed us from using said hosepipe. What was funny we were going to get the hose out yesterday and when we unravelled the thing we noticed that the outside tap was stuck in the “Stop” position. Someone somewhere was making sure we didn’t use that hose!
The golden rod looks gigantic and the flowers are starting to open and the tomatoes are looking healthy too.
Cheers for the pictures Debby as they are appreciated here.
On Sunday 11th August 2024 at 0900/1300 hrs UTC on 6160 kHz and then at 2000 UTC on 6160 kHz and 3975 kHz Imaginary Stations have yet another version of COOL, this time COOL 5 via Shortwave Gold. Like the last COOL shows, it’s summer vibes galore and tunes to listen to whilst on the sun lounger. Towels and suntan lotion at the ready please!
Then via WRMI on Wednesday 14th August 2024 at 0200 UTC on 9395 kHz they’ll be bringing you a back to school special of KMART, your “official supermarket shortwave radio station”. Expect voucher give-aways, extended opening hours and the best blue light specials on the planet (*All subject to availability of course). Tune in and enjoy an alternative to shopping via the shortwave dial.
Influenced by (Mike and) Julia‘s brilliant photographs from Crete and from their garden posted earlier today, we walked around the back and took some snaps. The echinops (Globe Thistle) that didn’t flower last year as they were only small plants, are now flowering and attracting many bees.
Remember we’re thinking of possibly producing a Weeds up to me knees “alternative to the Countryfile calender” so please send us your photographs. If it does go into production we will of course be doing events like opening supermarkets and after-dinner speaking to bored business people around the country and we will take all the contributors with us on a coach. If we pull some strings we may even all get to meet the great John Craven (who once danced on a Blue Peter Christmas Special we seem to remember).
We read somewhere that there’s been a marked downturn of pollinating insects this year but it did seem it was all go on that front earlier. We didn’t know that the echinops are very popular to the buzzing species and even now at 6pm the bees are still at it fighting for the best spot on the golf ball type flowers. Have a good Saturday night!
And here’s a tune from yesteryear that we’d forgot all about, it’s the New York Dolls with Stranded in the Jungle. A very mad tune, but a good one.
Thanks again to Mike and Julia for the pics of their back garden when they returned from their holiday. “We now have two sunflowers and those purple things in our wild patch are chicory. The flowers close up at night when the bees have gone home.” Brilliant Mike!What we love here is they’ve got an olive tree, called Olive (of course). She’s in the top laft hand corner of the picture and as Mike says “seems to be benefiting from the high temperatures”. Excellent!
And here’s a great rich coloured clematis and a “Ms Mars” sunflower, all looking wonderful. That’s it with holidays when you come back you will notice the difference in your garden.
Cheers to Mike and Julia for sending us some excellent horticultural snaps taken on their holiday to Crete. It was mighty hot out there they told us and it’s something else to think that plants actually survive the intense heat out there. The pomegranite tree is looking great and one we’d love in our garden.
Do enjoy these great pics.
We think they’ll be a follow up to this post as Julia has taken a good few pictures and they all look great! The above is the crimson bottlebrush that we have in the front garden and hasn’t really done all that well this year and we imagined it was to do with the heat. Thinking about it, we imagine Crete is possibly on average, a little bit hotter than Forest Hill.
Great photographs Julia and we’ll do a part two in a couple of days time as they are all great. Thanks for sending the holiday pictures as it’s great to see what grows elsewhere in the world. Do send us your worldwide plant pics to one deck pete at gee mail dot com.
Reggae is one of those genres that if you think you know a little, you’ll always be suprised. By pure fluke we found the above tune from Ranking Toyan – Kill No Man whilst looking for another Toyan tune on youtube. We then remembered the horn version on the LP Aggrovators Meet The Revolutionaries we bought in a second hand shop many moons ago and used the title track on a “Radio Clarion Vs KDUB” shortwave mix. That thing called the internet can be great sometimes!
A big shout out to our good friends across the pond Dr Strangedub and DJ Baby Swiss of the excellent radio show The Echo Chamber on KFAI. As we’ve said before, if you want to hear reggae, dub, downbeat and beyond, tune in from 8 – 12 UK time on a Wednesday morning here for a cracking good show. At around 37 minutes into the 24th of July show you’ll hear Madtone‘s “Who’d be a pirate” just before a lovely garden related tune from Sister Julie called Garden Binghi.
Have a listen to the whole show here as it’s wonderful stuff! Thanks again the good Doctor!
The other day we walked up by the Brockley Best Hand Car Wash and saw an excellent example of guerrilla gardening in action that even the great Gansta Gardener Ron Finley would be proud of.
We’ve walked past there a fair few times before but never noticed any gardening going on. Whether it’s the actual car cleaners themselves or someone utilising the triangular space of land on the corner of the forecourt there’s a load of tomato plants that are looking well loved and healthy. Someone’s giving them a good watering and feed by the look of it and it was a nice suprise to the eyes!
Across the road from there is something else we never noticed before even though we’ve been told about it a couple of times (cheers Steve). Lorenzo’s Records has been in the locality for 3 years and it’s a great record shop. Sadly we didn’t stay long but we’ll be visiting again. Narmy from there told us about the excellent LP from Mort Garson (below) when we mentioned Weeds up to me knees and how it was about gardening as well as music. We’d forgotten that Justin Patrick Moore of the excellent Radio Phonics Laboratory book mentioned this to us a while back here after we recognised the LP sleeve. What with it being so Weeds related we thought we’d post it again. Great recommendation Narmy!
We bought a handful of singles from the shop including this one that we’ve never heard before from Ezz Reco And The Launchers With Boysie Grant called King Of Kings. There’s some crazy lion noises at the start and towards the end which adds to the tune. On first listen we thought it was some of strange warp on the vinyl.
You think you know the area you live in and it’s great to know that there are still hidden (music and gardening) treasures that can take you by suprise.
Weeds up to me knees 