There’ll be no venturing out tomorrow

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Above is the weather forecast predicting heavy snow for the SE23 area in the morning. And we were thinking of forking up those frost-bitten dahlias and bringing them indoors to be stored until the spring. Doubt if they’ll be much chance of us being out the back tomorrow.

There’s a couple of pots of coriander and basil seeds in some houseplant compost sitting on the kitchen windowsill with a freezer bag put over each to give them a mini-greenhouse effect in an economic style. Will they germinate is the question but it’s worth trying.

And here’s a just discovered nice tune in a downtempo style to make you forget of the crap weather to come by John Hobbs called Last Night in Barcelona on M-Sol a hypnotic tune you want to keep rewinding. Stay safe and stay warm!

Hear your garden through the speakers

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A big thanks to Justin Patrick Moore for selecting this gardening themed ambient LP from Virginia Astley called From Gardens Where We Feel Secure from 1983. Justin also mentioned a nice piece from Simon Reynolds about the album here that’s worth casting an eye over.

Our favourite is the piece with the church bells, birds singing and some backwards business called “When the Fields Were on Fire”. Great stuff.

Know any more gardening themes tunes or LPs? if so get in contact with us at Weeds by leaving a comment and we’ll get back to you. Cheers Justin for this one.

An odd sausage and the king of dub’s brother

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Last night we were searching through a pile of singles that we haven’t looked through for years for a forthcoming shortwave radio mix when we came across a very odd sausage indeed (above and below).

It’s a seven inch single from Macclesfield Chorus Of Mutes on the Lyntone record label (who used to mainly press flexidiscs and also ran a mastering service) and the number is LYN 0000/0. On the A is a track named Tacets (wrote by Marcelle Marceau and Ed. J. Routh they reckon on the label) which is one long test tone at the same frequency throughout and plays at thirty three and a quarter rpm. On the B side Rests is totally silent and supposedly cut at forty five and three quarters rpm. Bonkers!

This was found in a charity shop in Covent Garden a few years ago for 50 pence. We can’t find anything on it apart from it may be from the early 1970’s and possibly given away free with a Christmas issue of Private Eye from the info here and there’s a copy on ebay for £40 and that’s all. Any ideas?

Also last night we thought we found a cracker of a tune from 1974 (below) after recognising the name felt-tipped out on the label Genuine Way by Lloyd “Scunna” Ruddock (brother of King Tubby who provides the nice dub on the B side).

We only first heard this tune a couple of years ago on Steve Barker’s On the Wire and when we pulled it out of the pile we just couldn’t believe it! Turns out the title was felt-tipped out for a reason, it wasn’t the said tune. It was another Roy Cousins produced track which we didn’t recognise. To say we were disappointed is a understatement. You win some, you lose some.

 

Dub gardeners of the world unite

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A big shout to Jesse Yuen who presents the excellent RTM.FM show North of the River Swan that specialises in downtempo dub and low end business on the second Sunday of the month from 4-6pm. Thanks to Jesse for sending us some pics (Thanks to Dee for taking them) of his great looking indoor planting scheme. The space is so bright and alive!

There’s a good variety of plants here even though us at Weeds are not the best when it comes to looking after plants of the indoor variety (we tend to overwater them then forget about them we’re ashamed to say.) There’s all sorts here including Kentia Palm, Chinese money plant (sometimes known as the UFO plant!), Prayer Plant, Tropic Snow, Mother-in-law’s Tongue, Devils Ivy, Parlour Palm, Umbrella Tree, Yucca, Mistletoe cactus (that looks well interesting) and the well hardy Spider Plant. (By the way whilst we’re on the subject of houseplants we have to mention a podcast to start following if you love gardening of the great indoors. It’s Jane Perrone‘s On the Ledge available here.)

And Jesse sent some of his favourite tunes from the North of the River Swan record boxes below to get stuck into. We didn’t know a lot of this stuff and that is what’s good about this music lark, once you open up that can of worms it’s never ending. There’s a ton of excellent tunes played on the show too so peruse the show’s mixcloud site here.

And do listen to the last episode of the show from 2020 featuring Jesse and Dubplate Pearl as it’s excellent stuff and full of some cracking tunes! Includes Prince Fari, Yabby You, Tradition, the great Depthcharge from Keith Hudson (What a tune!), a dub of Play fool get wise by Johnny Clarke and lots more great music.

Thanks again Jesse for sending the pics and the tunes!

The more you know, the more you realise you don’t know

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A big shout to Your Host of the excellent shortwave radio programme This is a Music Show for earlier this year turning us on to a cracker of tune Night Owl by Lee & The Clarendonians with a wonderful version on the B side.

Today whilst going through a couple of shows we missed over the festive period another version of the rhythm by Roy Richards called Dead and Wake was played. Another firecracker of a track!

And as if by magic we found another version on youtube by the great Dennis Alcapone called Fine Style.

And here’s the original doo-wop version by Tony Allen & The Champs.

And talking of This is a Music Show here’s the last two episodes featuring the best of Your Host’s thrift show finds from 2020. These shows will definitely cheer you up especially after tonight’s rubbish news of another bloomin’ lockdown a loomin’ (until mid February) here in the UK. #anotherlockdownaloomin #thisisamusicshow #shortwavesnotdead

https://soundcloud.com/thisisamusicshow/this-is-a-music-show-095

https://soundcloud.com/thisisamusicshow/this-is-a-music-show-096

 

That was the year that was

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Happy New Year to all our readers and gardening and music friends worldwide! We hope the forthcoming year is a tad better than the one just gone. May your seeds sprout splendidly, that you will have harvest’s a plenty and you can look forward to nice relaxing days in the garden post spring.

To help you relax on the Saturday night after New Year’s to accompany those New Year’s resolutions and the “new starts” here’s a lovely number from Lullatone called Sunday Morning Shopping with a Stroller. It’s from those heady days of 2006 when you could sit in friend’s back gardens with people you didn’t really know, cough and splutter without worry and shake people’s hands. Ah for the good old days eh?

Fingers numb and faces aglow

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There was a little bit of sunshine today in Forest Hill but it was bitterly cold as we brought the potato and brussels sprouts peelings down to the compost heap. There’s some sort of storm a brewing tomorrow evening we’ve been told too. That’s all we need.

Have a good festive season! May the Bailey’s be a flowing and there’s no end of turkey sarnies on white bread for the time being (until you get bored of them). May the spring come around soon and things get back to some sort of new normal in the very near future.

We don’t like to give it large…

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A big thanks to Medwyn’s of Anglesey for sending us a trial seed pack of the “longest leek”! The company specialises in some great prize winning vegetables that have won medals at Chelsea and the like. Exhibiting vegetables is well out of our league and don’t really interest us here but we’re going to give them leeks a go in the spring and will keep you posted on their progress.

How do people out there feel about long leeks, parsnips the length of a golf putter and onions the size of footballs? What we wonder is, when they’ve been grown to an expanded size, do they actually still taste nice? We’d love to know!

‘ere? ‘ave you seen me Solstice?

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Happy Solstice to one and all! Think of today as “The beginning of winter’s death” (Den Ming Dao, 365 Tao #355 Winter) rather than the grey, drizzly day stuck in lockdown again, the Monday before Christmas 2020 it really is.

We are presently keeping ourselves amused by watching the replay of the Stonehenge Winter Solstice stream here on youtube where at the moment there’s a bunch of security guards in high visibility vests congregating in the upper right hand corner either having their own celebration or standing around a calor gas heater.

Big shout to all our gardening and music mates worldwide and remember, from today the days will be getting longer and the sunny days are on their way (well we can dream can’t we?)

Holding back the tiers

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We go up another tier level this week, how are we going to cope with another lockdown? You can’t really go out in the garden as it’s a bit wet even though there’s been some warmer weather promised later this week. One job we will do is to get some gnat-free herb plants going on the kitchen windowsill after a summer of constant clouds of fungus gnats on our old pots. We’ve watered from the bottom and put up sticky traps and now going to admit defeat and starting again from scratch. More about the gnats and how to protect against them here.

We took some advice from the folks at Shannon’s and bought some indoor houseplant potting mix which should be free of any gnat’s eggs, put the old plants outside and give the actual pots a good clean with some disinfectant and then rinsed them through a few times for luck. It’s a bit early to be sowing anything really serious but we may start off a bit of basil (above: a few packs of seeds bought off ebay the other week) off in a pot with a see-through plastic bag on the top as a temporary greenhouse. As soon as the seeds show signs of propagation we’ll take the plastic off as to stop any damping off occurring.

Next summer we may be experiencing “a new normal” in the kitchen (ie. without clouds of gnats flying about or those sticky traps that don’t look too nice with lots of dead flies on them!)