Tag Archives: Marc B

Monday night serious listening

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Thanks to our good friend Marc B for letting us know today about this great show featuring the late great Penny Reel which starts with a couple of old doo-wop tunes with their reggae counterparts and then into some very choice tunes, a show well worth listening to!

There’s another show up on Weeds, posted not long after his passing which featured Penny with Paul Bradshaw here. Below is one of the tunes he played on it, The Lord’s Army by Hy Mann that we’d previously never heard of. The tune sounded like it may have been recorded at the same session as a personal favourite of ours Follow You by M (Martell?) Robinson. This music lark never fails to disappoint, opening a can of worms also comes to mind.

STOP PRESS And talking of opening cans of worms, as if by magic we have been directed to a Jamaican born singer called Martel Robinson who used to sing in working mens clubs in Coventry and Birmingham and release records under M Robinson. Same chap? We do hope so!

STOP PRESS JULY 2023: Also known as Ray Martell!

https://www.discogs.com/artist/2205400-Martel-Robinson

Welcome to the night train, welcome

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Yesterday evening just after sundown we wandered to the bottom of the garden just to take in a bit of the night-time air. With a little bit of light coming from the back of a neighbour’s house we could just make out two frogs “doing lengths” in the newly renovated pond. Lovely to see them back. Nice to hear their croaks too!

The netting which keeps the Lewisham Heron from getting its beak in has a few raised areas at the side that night visitors can get in and out of and in the top left hand corner is a moss covered stick come frog ladder. it was great to see we have visitors making a trip and it’s been a while since we noticed we had frogs and we wonder if it was the ever decreasing depth of the pond was putting them off before.

It was also nice to see that the Tree Lilies we got given from our good mate Marc B (cheers for passing them on Marc!) have started to sprout! Here’s one of them above. That’s what’s good about gardening the receiving and passing on of surplus plants and seeds.

We’re writing this while listening to an old Ross Allen show on NTS and this is playing from the late great Bunny Wailer.

And a couple of posts ago we posted up the track by L.S.Diezel called Volume 1 that had a lovely Yabby You sample in it and Ross has just played the tune that was sampled in a remix style. Tune! Roll on the good weather so we can play tunes like this loud!

Dahlias during the day, Perseids later on tonight

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Big shout to our good mate Marc B for passing on a tuber of this lovely dahlia earlier this year. Look at it now! Ok it’s a bit thirsty looking and is a bit droopy but don’t we all feel like that when the temperature’s as mad as this?

Remember it’s the peak of a meteor shower tonight (or thereabouts.) So if you’re thinking of sitting out the back later on (it’s far too hot to sit in or even for trying to get to sleep!) have a look at this site here (and their twitter account here) it’s “Dead good” as they say. We’ve had many a happy evening looking at their twitter feed, looking up at the night sky, looking at their twitter feed, looking up at the night sky (Ad infinitum).

You’ve come a long way…

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It’s mad, the photo above shows the raised beds just before lockdown in March. My, how time’s flown eh? How many week’s have we been lockdown for? 14, 15, 16? The garden isn’t bothered how long though, it’s cracking on and with this present warm and wet weather here in London it’s getting on with what it does best. Look at those raised beds now (below), the spuds (Two bags of seed potatoes from Shannon’s. By the way the garden centre did a sterling job getting people supplied with stuff around the start of lockdown) are starting to take over and it’s becoming a bit of a jungle around there. There’s peppers, lettuce, carrots and a cabbage somewhere in amongst that lot! That’s our new incinerator too, ta for Marc B for dropping that off in a social distanced manner!

We’ve pulled out a few handfuls of spuds from around the potato plants making sure that the plant wasn’t disturbed too much and then we piled the earth/compost over the crown of the plant so any spuds near the surface wouldn’t have the chance to turn green. And here’s the spuds (below), we’re confused if they’re the first earlies, second earlies or premature maincrop ones. It doesn’t really matter, they tasted excellent and what did they taste of? Yes potatoes but real potatoes!

The lockdown may be getting us all down but if you’re fortunate enough to have a garden/windowsill/balcony and growing stuff, you know that it keeps you that little bit sane(r)! By the way here’s two tips we swear by here at Weeds, the first is to nip the sideshoots out of your tomato plants (not if they are the bush variety though) so all the goodness goes into the main stem and the flowers.

And a silly but effective one, if you know it’s going to rain get the hoe out a few hours beforehand and just scratch up the surface of somewhere in your garden that don’t look that grand. Below is a particulary not brilliant bit at the bottom of the garden which seems to get all sorts of weeds and bindweed a lot. We gave it a good “tip-around with a hoe” (as they used to say in the council) yesterday and it now looks great! We’re hoping it get’s a good covering of borage for the next couple of months to keep the bees happy. Happy lockdown gardening! #gardeninginlockdown #goingmadinlockdown

Seed saving and other stories

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Cheers to our good friend Marc B for letting us know about a feature which was up our street on BBC’s Gardeners’ World this week about a “seed guardian” in Wales called Adam Alexander.  It’s excellent stuff to watch and it’s on i-player here episode 22 at about 25 minutes in. Have a look at Adam’s blog too (here) as he’s an interesting chap to say the least and has loads of advice on growing stuff, collecting seed and a lot more!

Talking of saving seeds and the like here’s news via @freedomseedbank of a great free event at the Skip Garden Harvest Festival on September 22nd at the Skip Garden, 1 Tapper Walk, London N1C 4AQ which includes a seed saving workshop explaining amongst other things “the theory and practice of saving seeds” which sounds great stuff. For more information and to book pop to their eventbrite page here.#saveyourownseeds