Big shout to Gerry Hectic for sending us a pic of his dustbin fruit container conversion job which he did last year. It’s coming on a treat at the moment, look at those strawberries turning red! That’s a great idea Gerry!
And (below) here’s a few random flower pics from the Weeds garden taken this morning.
If you’ve got pics ofyour garden do send them in! Email them to onedeckpete (at) gmail.com and also send us a tune if you fancy it as well!
It’s all gone a bit bonkers in the garden here what with the good weather of late plus the combination of the rain we had a few weeks previous to that. The veg in the raised beds (above) are tearing away and the spuds are almost flowering.
We’ve let the grass go a bit wilder due to No Mow May and we’re beginning to like the idea. I think it’s the council gardening background made us a bit reticent to let the lawn grow more than a few inches. The only thing is now that we can’t see where our old cat leaves its “presents” so we have to go by smell and tread very carefully in the evening.
The pond is going great after the big pond liner change. The fish seem to like it and we’ve even got tadpoles in there now and we didn’t even spot any frogspawn beforehand. We were told many years ago by a workmate that down the Walworth Road one Sunday in the 1960’s “It rained frogs” (a report of raining frogs in Croydon here), perhaps it could’ve been raining tadpoles overnight in Forest Hill recently?
And the bed next to the new fence has come alive with new plants procured from the market, garden centre and seeds off ebay and friends. The comfrey plants that usually go mad have probably been checked when the fence went in so the comfrey feed has suffered so far but you never know as we’ve got a few months yet. But can you believe that it’s really June? We cant.
Whilst we’ve been writing this, the below was the musical background. One of the best music shows on the shortwaves!
KFOG takes to the high seas via Channel 292 on Sunday June 20th 2021 at 1200 utc (1 pm UK time) and on Saturday June 26th at 0900 utc (10 am UK time) on 6070 kHz. Expect tunes in a nautical style and “see the glimmer from a distant lighthouse, as the buoys ding and the (radio) waves crash onto the rocky shore. This is music from the mist!” as they say at KFOG HQ.
Expect a mix from One Deck Pete called “A mix from across the Pond” with tunes from Kiyoko, Honeychild & DJ Olive, BOATS, Robert Mellin and The Congo’s. Grab yourself a lifejacket and a shortwave radio and tune in. If the shortwave radio is a problem tune in here at the alloted time. If you haven’t a lifejacket we’re sorry but we can’t help you with that!
We were listening to the excellent Sugar B show on his daily 7-10 am spot on 4Tune FM and today being a Tuesday it was full of roots and culture classics. It was brilliant to hear this belter of a tune “The Thruth Theme” from a few years ago made by the great Joey Jay and co. A tune and a half!
Do yourself a favour and tune into Sugar B in the morning (he’s also on from 3pm-6pm on a Sunday too)!
It’s been a while since we’ve heard about our friend (and musical collaborator) Paul Greenstein‘s garden in Melbourne, Australia. He’s sent us over a few pics and news of what he’s up to now. For around a year he’s been keeping bees.
“We started with a ‘nucleus’ hive, which is a small box with 5 frames. We’ve now grown to 3 full-sized boxes (supers), although we’ve packed the bees down into 2 boxes for the winter. For the bees, it’s about staying warm. From the beekeeper’s perspective, you want to make it easy for them to stay nice and toasty, and not to have to worry about heating a lot of empty space. Kind of like downsizing your house to save on the bills, except they keep warm by vibrating their flight muscles while keeping their wings still. Amazing little creatures.
We haven’t harvested any honey this time around, preferring to let the bees keep it for food during winter, building up a strong hive. We live very near a creek (basically a river, but not a very big one) – and there’s loads of stuff for bees to forage. Lots of Eucalypt trees, although there’s a particular type of Eucalypt called Stringybark or Messmate, which for some reason makes bees angry. Maybe they don’t like the way it smells. Hopefully they’ll avoid those and we won’t get stung by grumpy foragers…”
He also mentioned the subject of the last but one post about cicadas from Justin Patrick Moore:
“We get incredibly loud cicadas here – in fact they’ve been known to drown out conversation! Apparently the version we have here are called Greengrocer Cicadas, and can go up to 120 dB – louder than an ACDC gig. Our cats occasionally get fed up and swat them with a paw – they’ll go silent in shock for a few seconds, then start up again.”
Below is a pic of a Bramley apple that he’s put in as “You can’t get decent cooking apples over here!” We do like a cooking apple here especially in a crumble with custard! Do have a look at older posts about his garden here here and here.
And here’s a couple from Paul’s musical output, a lovely garden related tune called “Rose” that has a lovely ambient feel to it and one with a Jah Wobble type vibe called “White Blinds“, excellent stuff indeed!
As it says on his soundcloud “Sometimes inwards is the only way to go.” He and the bees are 100% correct! Cheers for the pictures Paul and keep us updated with how things are getting on!
Just a quick one to report that the KDUB broadcast from earlier this year will be repeated on WRMI this Sunday May 30th at 2300 UTC or Midnight UK time on 9395 kHz on the shortwaves. There’s a mix from One Deck Pete called “In Dub for KDUB” at 3.09 minutes in.
All the shows from the KMTS (or is it KTMS?) back catalogue are available on Mixcloud here if you’ve missed any of them. Tune in and dub out!
Here’s a post from our good radio, gardening and music friend across the pond Justin Patrick Moore about some bugs that are about in his back yard in Cincinnati at the moment. We’ve never even heard of them over here!
The seventeen year cicadas are at it again. This generation of periodical cicadas has been dubbed Brood X. The periodical cicadas have the latin name of Magicicada septendecim, and have a really interesting life cycle. In southwestern Ohio they are of the kind that come out every seventeen years. These insects spend around 99.5% of their long life underground as nymphs, feeding on fluids from tree roots in the eastern United States. In the spring of their 17th year the mature cicada emerges between late April and early June at a given locality, depending on temperature, and when they come out, they are usually in huge numbers. They’ve been creeping out of the ground slowly the past few weeks, but this past Saturday was the first day I saw a bunch of them. The temperature of the soil has to reach a certain temperature before they really start coming out of the ground, making little holes that they then emerge from. The soil has to get about 17.9 °C (64 °F) before they are ready to get busy with each other propagating a new brood which is what they will spend the next four to six weeks doing. To attract a mate the males of the species have to make a long sonorous drone, that gets louder in the neighborhood as more and more cicadas come out of the ground and start flying and flitting about. Mostly they like to hang out on trees. Apparently in the eastern U.S. where these little buggers live, billions are going to emerge. That’s a lot of cicadas.
This is the third time in my life that I’ve seen the cicada’s. The first time was when I was a kid in 1987. Unfortunately as a kid I was rather cruel to these little things. Hopefully I’ve already worked off the karma I generated by being mean to bugs. (Be nice to the cicadas as they don’t hurt nobody and help aerate the soil!) The next time was in 2004 and I made a recording of them to use in the drone & experimental ambient music I am so fond of. I still have the recording but don’t know if I ever actually made a track with the sounds. That first time around too, there was a local pizzeria called Snappy Tomato Pizza. They made a jingle for Snappy Cicada Pizza that has stuck in my head ever since I heard it. They had a promotion that if anyone came in and ate a cicada they’d get a free pizza. Apparently they also had them to use as a pizza topping – but I think that was just part of their marketing ploy that has now become local folklore. Hear the jingle here.
Here is some cicada music: https://benseretan.bandcamp.com/album/cicada-waves
According to a story I saw on NPR some of these cicadas are going to go into a sexual hyperdrive caused by a fungus that is similar to ones found in psychedelic mushrooms. It’s a trippy time of year over here!
From: https://www.npr.org/2021/05/18/997998920/the-fungus-thats-making-cicadas-sex-crazy ( It’s so weird!)
“Kasson, who has been studying Massospora for about five years, says just before the cicadas rise from the ground, the spores of the fungus start to infect the bug. Once it’s above ground and starts to shed its skin to become an adult, its butt falls off.
Then a “white plug of fungus” starts to grow in its place.
A “white plug of fungus” seen in cicadas infected by Massospora.
Matt Kasson
“It looks as if the backside of the cicada is being replaced either by chalk or by like one of those nubby middle school erasers,” Kasson says.
The insects have no idea what’s happening. The fungus, however, is “pulling the strings” and making the cicadas want to mate with everyone.
Males that are infected will continue to mate with females, but they’ll also pretend to be females so they can spread the fungus to even more partners.
“It’s sexually transmissible,” Kasson tells NPR. “It’s a failed mating attempt, of course, because there’s no genitalia back there.”
The fungus causes different reactions in different types of cicadas. Periodical cicadas, which take more than a decade between appearances, get sex crazy from cathinone. In yearly cicadas, the fungus makes them instead become hypersexual from psilocybin — the same chemical found in psychedelic mushrooms.
Kasson estimates Massospora probably infects fewer than 5% of cicadas. And as far as he knows, the bugs are not in any pain.
“Everybody’s having a good time while they’re infected,” he says. “So I don’t imagine there’s much pain — maybe a desire to listen to the Grateful Dead or something like that, but no pain.”
Thanks very much Justin for the interesting piece and he also mentions to have a look at a blog post from a nature sound recordist in Ohio about the sounds the Cicadas make… and there’s lots of pictures. Have a look and listen here.
It’s been a bit of doom and gloom for the last few posts what with the bad weather so here’s a couple of uplifting things seen this morning. Firstly the first poppy of the season opening up, it may be small but it’s a lovely red!
And this little seedling (below) will hopefully will be supplying us with some purple srouting broccoli if all goes well. Roll on full days of sunshine eh?
Here’s some pictures to convey how bad the weather was yesterday around 5pm in London town. It started as a downpour, then heavier rain and then mad hail! To say it was chucking it down was an understatement. A fast flowing stream appearing under the back gate from the drive and then the hail built up at the start of the lawn and it’s still there now.
Watch those seedlings. We may not be having frosty nights but heavy rain and hail can be a pain. One good thing with all of this rain is that the pond is filling up. That makes a change!
We were complaining a few weeks ago about that there weren’t enough rain as we’ve had to go out and manually water all the new additions to the garden.
In the past few days we’ve bought some lupins and stuck them together in a group in a bed near to the house, acquired some strawberry plants (cheers Dylan!) and as reported previously the tree lilies we were given (cheers Marc!) are also starting to come up. The giving and exchanging, the swap-shop value of gardening is what we love here, we also love the local garden centre (Shannon’s) for plants and advice and it’s nice to see the re-emergence of local plants sales (plant pots stuck on a wall outside someone’s house at cheap as chips prices) or have they never gone away?
What we don’t love is the current weather. For the past few days it’s been warm one minute, cold the next and then you see on twitter someone’s had a frost or a light dusting of snow. Well it’s back on with the protection in the evenings on top of the raised beds here even though the potatoes are coming on well and the plants that have been outside hardening off (above) will have to come in for the night. We won’t get too discouraged as it’ll be summer soon. Or will it?
Weeds up to me knees 