Tag Archives: Ken Barlow

The solstice in the comfort of your own slippers

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“This year Winter Solstice will be marked at Stonehenge on the morning of the 22nd December, not the 21st December.” English Heritage.

We nearly started up the (DJ) horsebox earlier this morning to make the trek down to the ‘henge and join Ken Barlow and the hundreds of others for the solstice festivities. Thank God we found out that English Heritage has changed the date before setting off. Let’s hope the many who go down by train know about the date change or they’ll find they will need to buy an open saver return instead of a day return or they will be travelling illegaly.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHAW279FnSo

If you want to miss out on the train, the layers of mud and hours of waiting, technology has come to the rescue as English Heritage have a live stream going tomorrow morning with some ambient accompaniment (above). So put on your best slippers, have some tea and toast ready and watch the sunrise from the comfort of your armchair without breaking any laws. A Happy Solstice to you all, whenever or wherever you’ll be celebrating the solstice.

Raking up the Hugel

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Cheers to our good music/gardening/radio friend Justin Patrick Moore for sending us some great reading on Hugelkultur, this time on the greatly named Druids Garden (which has no affiliation to Ken Barlow sadly) site here. 

We’d never even heard of the system before he told us about it a while ago but it’s looks well interesting and if you can get your hands on some logs, you’re in!

Back yard reportage 1

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A belated Happy Solstice to one and all! It was a shame we couldn’t get Ken Barlow, Jamie Reid or Arthur Pendragon (they were busy elsewhere) in our garden first thing yesterday to give the plants added help with a blessing or two but we have the next best thing, a bucket of home-made Comfrey Liquid (with added borage and nettle leaves) ponging away nicely!

It’s been such a boost (we use it diluted, 10 parts water to every 1 part of the dark stinky liquid on a weekly basis) all over the garden especially the various poppies that are coming up now after we used the “throw em randomly and see” method of distribution from seeds obtained from Shannon’s, ebay or off a seed swap or two. A few years ago we were into how many types of mint we could find, now we’ve moved onto poppies!

We mention Comfrey liquid, yesterday we passed on a bottle of the said pongy stuff to Honor Oak Park train station to add some weight to their entry in the annual “Station in bloom” contest. We gave them an accompanying set of instructions ‘Warning this stuff smells (think of  body odour and times it by twenty), apply once a week diluted 10 to 1 very early in the morning or you will lose customers!” Best of luck to them!