Hear your garden through the speakers

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.

On the shortwaves on Sunday

It’s DJ Frederick‘s Free Radio Skybird on shortwave this Sunday 11th October (and repeated the week after.) The broadcast goes out at 1100 UTC (12 Noon UK time) on 6070 kHz via Channel 292. There’s a great piece on Numbers stations, Justin Patrick Moore‘s Radiophonic Laboratory and One Deck Pete with “Tunes to cheer you up.” Tune in! #shortwavesnotdead #freeradioskybird

That music’s lost its taste, so try another flavour

Big thanks to our music/gardening/radio friend across the pond Justin Patrick Moore for sending us another example of horticulturally inspired (plant) music.

It’s by Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith and the bandcamp set is called Cows will eat the weeds. The weeds/herbs include Milk Thistle, Rabbit Brush and Yarrow amongst a few more. Investigate her bandcamp as it’s worth “having a butchers at” as the market traders say.

This set is from the grand old year of 2012 and the music is of the chilled experimental variety that we love here and is a album well worth delving into if you love that kind of stuff too. Our favourite is Wild Rose at the moment and we can see that changing! Electronica and plants do mix!

High as a Kite

Big shout to Lord Kelvinator for last week’s St GIGA special that went out on Trash Flow Radio on Cincinnati’s noncommercial community radio station WAIF 88.3 FM. The tripped out 3 hours of satellite sounds features One Deck Pete‘s “The Rule of the Twelfths mix” at 43 minutes in on the mixcloud featuring:
Madtone – Pete’s ambient breakfast (2020 retouch)
ARK – Sirens of Titan
Uriel –You Who Are Reading Me Now Kid Loco’s Love Experience Mix
Alistair Colling – Oboro Zukiyo (Night of the misty moon)  ‎

Cheers for Justin Patrick Moore for the cosmic link up! #stGIGAinlockdown

Satellite’s gone up to the skies

Tune in this Saturday 5th September from 3-6 pm Eastern Time (8-11 pm UK time) to Lord Kelvin the Harmonic Analyst on Trash Flow Radio on WAIF 88.3 FM, Cincinnati (listen on their radio player here.)

Lord Kelvin will be presenting a 3 hour homage to the Japanese ambient music satellite St. GIGA that ran for ten years from 1990. Weed’s very own One Deck Pete has contributed the Rule of the Twelfths mix which will be aired during the first hour of the program. Tune in on Saturday and sail away into space. Thanks go out to Justin Patrick Moore for putting us in touch with Lord Kelvin. #st.GIGA #ambientyvibes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gffC9HxDBr0

Alternatives to chutney

A big shout to our good friend Justin Patrick Moore from across the pond for sharing with us his Fried Green Tomatoes recipe.

We’ve never tried them before but are willing to give it a go! We don’t know how much sunshine we have left to ripen our remaining toms but this recipe certainly is an alternative to chutney or “unripe tomatoes in a drawer with a banana” trick! Here’s the recipe from Justin:

A classic recipe that my appalachian ancestors in Kentucky would serve alongside some poke salad.

Ingredients:
1/2 cup buttermilk
1 egg
1/2 cup flour, divided
1/2 cup stone ground cornmeal
1 teaspoon pepper
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon garlic power (optional)
3 medium green tomatoes (cut into 1/3 inch round slices)
1/2 cup vegetable oil

Directions:
In a shallow bowl, mix all the dry ingredients: 1/2 cup of cornmeal, 1/4 cup of flour, 1 teaspoon of pepper, 1 teaspoon of salt, and 1 teaspoon of garlic powder (optional). In another shallow bowl, combine the egg and ½ cup of buttermilk. Then place the remaining 1/4 cup of flour in a shallow bowl. Place the skillet on medium heat and coat it with 1/2 cup of oil.

Like an assembly line, cover the tomatoes with the flour, dip in the egg mix, and then dip in the cornmeal mix. Once pan is hot, pan-fry the tomatoes. You want to cook the tomatoes for about 3 minutes on each side or until golden brown. Once the tomatoes are crispy on each side, carefully remove and place on paper towels or a rack to drain. Serve with hot sauce or remoulade. (I prefer the remoulade.)

Remoulade recipe:
1 cup  Mayonnaise
¼ cup ketchup
2 tablespoons red wine vinegar
2 tablespoons Creole mustard
½ cup chopped green onions
¼ cup finely chopped celery
¼ cup chopped fresh parsley
1 tablespoon minced garlic
2 teaspoons Worcestershire sauce
1 teaspoon Louisiana-style hot sauce
Salt and cayenne pepper, to taste

Directions:
COMBINE mayonnaise, ketchup, red wine vinegar and Creole mustard in a medium mixing bowl and mix well.
ADD green onions, celery, parsley, garlic, Worcestershire, hot sauce, and salt and pepper (to taste), and whisk well.
AND EAT.
(Sauce can be stored in refrigerator for up to 4 days.)

Brilliant Justin, thanks for sharing that! Any more recipes for using up green tomatoes? Drop us a comment and we’ll post them up!

From our gardening friends abroad

And here’s a gardening update from our good friend across the pond Justin Patrick Moore with some pics of his veg patch in Cincinnati. From top to bottom, we have some lovely looking basil next to a great looking tomato plant. Wish our basil was looking as great as this one! And then below the tomato which looks like it’s enjoying growing there, loving those fruits!

And something we’ve never tried before, some healthy looking jalapeno‘s, the garden’s looking great Justin! #veglookinggoodincincinnati

And just in from our Cincinnati correspondent…

And this week’s guest garden pics are from our good friend Justin Patrick Moore in Cincinnati and it’s a garden that has a really nice feel to it! All text below from Justin and click here for a recent great piece on Delia Derbyshire from his blog sothismedias.com
The mugwort (below) is planted on the side of the house. I try to harvest some every year around the summer solstice to make smudge sticks with. It’s good on its own, or mixed with sage & lavender in a smudge. It grows real tall and gets kind of wild. Lily of the Valley has taken over the bottom area next to old muggy, and has spread there on its own, fast, from the patch of Lily we have in the front. Blackberry bushes on the fence are also making forays into this area. Our cat Flynn is chilling on the cellar doors.
I bought a mushroom growing kit back in April and gave it a go. I thought, after a few weeks, it didn’t work or I messed it up, so threw it on the compost (below). Now there are a few small oyster mushrooms growing in the compost. Not a bad spot for them really! Some things take longer to sprout than others.
We had a concrete patio put in last year and we’ve had some nice gatherings on it so far. Looking forward to when we can invite the friends, family, cousins and extended kin, blood or otherwise, back to the house and have a proper grill out and pot luck.
We moved the houseplants out and back inside three different times this past spring (below). Except the really big heavy ones I have to use a two-wheeler to get out, because really I’m only going to move those in the spring and the fall. I guess we really should have until the real last frost because they took a beating with repeated cold snaps, thunderstorms and then hot days. That’s Cincinnati weather for you. Wait a few minutes and it will change.
Our veg patch (main picture at the top) also took a beating. I may use some old windows we have to keep the seedlings warmer next year. Most of them didn’t really stick, so we ended up buying starter plants of lettuce, tomatoes, & jalapeno and putting those in, and my wife just got some thai basil and put that in. Our daughter had a bunch of romanesco they had started and she gave us a few to put in. And begged us to take more. That’s a new one for us (We at Weeds haven’t grown them either.)
On the other hand some seed we planted a few years back finally sprang up. We’ve been attempting to get a wildflower patch going around the birdfeeders, because it gets pretty messy around there anyway. Last year a bunch of sunflowers came up from the seed the birds left behind. We also had some borage and other stuff in there. But this year the foxglove seeds we put down -well, at least one- finally came up and made an appearance (above).
The Frankenstein t-shirt on the line I got on a field trip to a place up in Dayton, Ohio, an old surplus store that is going out of business in September. Mendelsons is the first place to look for every last thing, and it has a special place in the hearts of many local electronics and radio hobbyists because of the rows and rows and rows and rows of electronics they have there. “Mendelsons was established in 1960 by the late Harry Mendelson. With over 1 million square feet of warehouse space and inside loading dock facilities, Mendelson’s handles surplus & liquidation inventory from one box to 50 truckloads.” Besides the capacitors I picked up, I also picked up the Frankenstein shirt, because, well… he lives on electricity too. It was great trip with Robert K4PKM and Howard KD8WOY, which we dubbed the “Fellowship of the Fritter” because of the apple fritters I bought at the bakery before heading up to Dayton.
Brilliant stuff Justin, we love the garden here and Mendelsons looks a brilliant shop, it’s a shame it’s closing! And here’s a very chilled tune as chosen by Justin.

What you can actually do in ten seconds

A big shout to Gerry Hectic who told us about this compilation when they were originally looking for contributors. This compilation has over 200 10-second tracks and is released by ATTN:Magazine here. What’s great about it is that ALL proceeds from the sale of the set are donated to the charity Cool Earth who work alongside rainforest communities to halt deforestation and climate change.

There’s ten seconds from a variety of sources including Gerry Hectic, Justin Patrick Moore and Madtone amongst many many others! Cheers to Jack Chuter for including our track!

And the beet goes on

And here’s something interesting from our good friend across the pond, Justin Patrick Moore with a piece that’s well up our street! Cheers Justin!
There is nothing like some good down beet veggies, and downtempo music, to get into an up beet mood. I was thinking of this yesterday when scraping out the remains of my crock full of homemade beet and red cabbage sauerkraut. I was also thinking about something I recalled from Sandor Katz’s book Wild Fermentation (where I learned the basic techniques for making kraut and sour pickles, among other things). He said something along the lines of “The only difference between rotting vegetables and a fermented food is salt.”
Boy, ain’t that the truth. Before I tried making kraut, I always thought it would be hard. It turns out its as simple as chopping up a bunch of cabbage, and other veggies, throwing a bunch of good salt on them, pounding them down into a crock, then sticking a plate on top of it all, with some weights or a clean rock you’ve boiled, and then waiting for the amazing lactic acid transformation.
Sandor’s recipe for Kraut and is super easy to make with just some basic equipment and veg. Recipe in detail here.
This batch of kraut that I made here included the following ingredients, all shredded, like a punker rocker making dangerous swipes at a guitar:
About 9 or 10 raw beets
1 head purple cabbage
1 bunch of radishes
1 turnip
1 head of garlic
3 or 4 habaneros
1 large piece of ginger
The ginger & habanero pepper marry really well together with the flavor of the beets. I suppose you could also use the juice to dye your hair red, or if you were wanting to make your own Hammer horror film.
(By another chain of association, all this puts me in mind of that classic Dead Kennedy’s album, Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables. Now you know there is a cure for that, just add salt.)
I’m looking forward to when my pickling cucumbers come up in the garden. That’s when I’ll use Sandorkraut’s sour pickle recipe again. Mr. Katz is a great author, and Wild Fermentation, and his other book The Art of Fermentation, cover not only kraut and pickles, but sourdough and other living breads, wine, beer, cheese and even stuff like how to make miso or tempeh. It’s one of the few kitchen books I have that really makes the stuff grown in the garden, whether mine, a friends, or something picked up at the market, really sing with all that salt. Once you make a few batches of something you’ll be experimenting and trying new things out in no time, because it really is pretty simple once you get the knack.
With all that, I’ll leave you with this groaner and a track called Cultivator Dub from the DJ Spooky vs. Twilight Circus Dub Soundsystem collaborative album Riddim Clash.
What do you call someone who raps about vegetables? A Beet boxer.