What was funny, yesterday we were considering giving the lawn a cut after work as the weather was sunny and bright in the morning. Come 5pm the heavens opened, there was a flash hailstorm and then overnight there was a frost. The weather eh?
To take your mind off the cold here’s a nice dub from Mikey Dub which is the B side of the also great “Causeless shall not come” by Don Hartley. Cheers to Thomas at Explorations in dub for sending us this.
Thanks to Debby H for sending us pictures of her collection of indoor plants. Because until recently, she didn’t have a garden; she has an abundance of them. As we here at Weeds are not very good with houseplants, we love to see other people’s. The flowering cactus (above) looks great.
Now the picture above is brilliant, the Orchid is blooming and there’s a healthy looking Pineapple. We didn’t even know you could grow them here, even indoors! More on growing Pineapples here.
Debby wrote “I grew the Strelitzias AKA Bird of Paradise plants (above) from seed about 5 years ago. We are hoping they may flower sometime.” Wow and when they flower…
“I also grew the Canna (below) from a tiny plant. Last year it flowered continuously with beautiful bright red flowers. The Canna lives outdoors in the summer. We put the Strelitzias out too, but they hated it and wilted every day there was any sun! Strange because they generally live outdoors in warmer climates.” Brilliant stuff Debby, thanks a lot for that and do send us some picture updates and also when the strelitzias flower as that’ll be great.
Thanks to Wlad (US7IGN) from Ukraine for getting in touch this week with some pics of his germinating dill seeds and sprouting garlic and potatoes that are all looking healthy. For some reason the old trick of cutting up seed potatoes in two so you can have two potato plants instead of one just came to mind. We are sure it was a reader of the blog who sent us that tip many moons ago.
His good friend Sergiy (UT3UFD) has now started off a date palm and he’s also got that great looking banana plant and the both are growing well. Brilliant stuff and good to hear from you Wlad, keep us up to date how the plants are getting on!
Here’s A Ten Inch Mix from One Deck Pete which was recorded especially for the Imaginary Stations show WS10S, a celebration of the Ten inch single that was broadcast last December. Here’s the tracklistings:
Jasmine Ntoutoume & Madtone – What is man? – Blossoms Kitchen 10” Dubplate
Zap Pow – Broken Contract – Inbidimts/Trojan Records 10”
Ellis Island Sound – Republica Evescarra (played at 45rpm) – All City 10”
Les Kidnappeurs (Main Theme) (Revisited By Jackson) – Barclay 10”
Nicola Conte – Jazz Pour Dadine (The Dining Rooms Remix) – Schema 10”
Enjoy!
As we posted up the Andrew Weatherall at the Chinwag night at Outlaw Yacht Club, Leeds 2013 mix yesterday, we were reminded of the brilliant interview with Andrew by our good friend/Steroid Abuse DJ Chris Madden from the same evening. It’s a six parter but well worth watching!
It’s been four years since the passing of the great Andrew Weatherall can you believe. We saw on Facebook a link to this great mix from Outlaw Yacht Club, Leeds 2013 (from a great night presented by our good mate Chris Madden) and we just had to share it. The mix starts off with Big Youth, Ari Up, Dr Who in dub then goes into rockabilly and much more and you know what? It’s downloadable. RIP Andrew Weatherall.
It’s been exactly a fortnight since we lugged that bag of seed compost on two buses from the nearest B&Q and then sowed various seeds on the kitchen and the upstairs windowsills (post here) but we’re now seeing some action (it’s the tomatoes that are popping up first rather than the chillies). It’s been less time since we sowed the sweet peas (a week perhaps?) below.
There’s people who say they’d rather buy plants than seed as “they haven’t the time” to wait for the seed to grow. They forget after the seed has been sown and it has the right conditions it’s the seed that does all of the hard work in the background. All you have to do is make sure the compost is kept moist and all’s okay. Then all the gardener has to do is get on with their own lives (eat, sleep, drink and be merry) while the seeds get to work. There’ll be a bit of pricking out and repotting in the future but that’s hardly hard work and then the plant will just keep on growing hopefully.
Seed sowing, give it a try, you’ve got nothing it lose and it’s far cheaper. If you’ve got your own transport you won’t be lugging bags of compost on two buses either.
Cheers to DJ Frederick for letting us know about this great quaility half an hour recording of last week’s imaginary stations show WDWD – Off The Map Radio broadcast by Shortwave Gold. It was recorded in Belarus by Aleksandr Myadel (cheers Aleksandr for putting it up on youtube).
At 13 minutes in there’s One Deck Pete‘s “I’ll take the high road too” mix and here’s the tracklistings:
Stereognosis – Farewell
Outward Bound – First Cue
Tetsuo – Not taking the bus
Hidden Orchestra – East London Street
Tubby Isiah – Lost dub
If you want to hear more of the show, ten of the latest Imaginary Stations episodes are up online here at our Mixcloud. The show is also looking for some financial help to cover the production and transmission costs so we can continue to transmit on shortwave, more on that here:
Here’s a couple of tunes for a Friday evening. First an Augustus Pablo classic called Melody Dub which is a B side to the tune Unfinished Melody. It’s a stripped down bass and drum instrumental with a crisp high end, whisps of double-tracked melodica floating back and forth into the mix interspersed with short piano and keyboard parts. Definitely a less is more tune.
And another example of said style is the B side Roman Stewart’s I was lonely called One Heavy Duba for obvious reasons. As far as we can remember, the (slightly pressed off-centre and very scratched) copy we own was bought on a second-hand shop crawl of Nuneaton in the late 1970’s. Distance memories of boxes of scratched seven inchers nestled in dirty beer crates between rusting fridges and old washing machines with the smell of mould and damp coming from them, ahh the good old days that we’ll never see again etc…
We’ve just found out about the Incredible Edible Lambeth Seed Swap of 2024 which takes place on Saturday 24th February 2024 at the Garden Museum, Lambeth Palace Road, London SE1 7LB from 1pm-3pm. Looks good! More details here.
Our favourite part of the flyer was “Tea /coffee and a few biscuits will be on offer.” Only a few biscuits? Has that line been put in to put off the free biscuit freeloaders? It looks like a brilliant event no matter how many biscuits available!
Weeds up to me knees 