Tag Archives: thyme

A report from Bristol

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Thanks to Kit, G0JPS in Bristol for letting us know he did a bit of garden clearance yesterday (Easter Sunday) which included “removing a huge tangle of cleavers (if the name isn’t familiar, you’d know what they are straight away when you see the picture of them) and the sad deceased remnants of a fuchsia bush.”

“Found this nice little sectioned off bit (above) under the wreckage; so gave it a good hoeing, sowed it with foxglove seeds, and rehomed a small thyme plant rescued from a supermarket car park. And pinched your idea of sticks and things to keep the cats off.” Brilliant Kit, we love your choice of metal sticks and wood that will keep the cats and probably the foxes off too we reckon.

He added  “Thinking that it’s a bit of a blank slate now, the words Tabula Rasa popped into my mind so here’s a couple of tune suggestions:”

They are two excellent tunes that we’d never heard before. The first is Tabla Rasta who were from Crete with Mystic Dub and Brother Dan from Sweden with Bay Leaf and Thyme Dub. Excellent musical recommendations Kit, do keep them coming!

Who would have thought it, in January too!

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We had no idea that the weather would be so nice today, the north of the UK have had power cuts and storms galore yet the sun was out in SE23.

We took advantage and cut down the dead wood on some rosemary, thyme, oregano and some mint in pots (the only way to grow mint unless you want to plant to take over your garden). Above is an example of some other dead wood in the sun.

We also moved some dormant plants about and gave them a little watering in. There’s a forecast of rain tomorrow but we had a nice “red sky at night” so we’re a bit confused. Not sure if we’ll be able to get out tomorrow but it was nice while it lasted today. Roll on the spring!

Easy, take it easy

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We were raring to go Saturday morning, the weather was going to be nice and there was so much to do out in the garden but we were forgetting one thing, it was only a couple of weeks ago we were suffering with sciatica so we had to take it easy.

We had six bags of compost delivered by Shannon’s thinking that’ll be more than enough. It was gone before we knew it and we could have done with six more to be honest. Even lifting one bag of compost was tiring so we really had to take it easy on the Saturday so we tidied up the bed by the dad corner, taking out the odd cabbage and old beetroot and filling up the raised beds to a nice depth of compost (pic above – before we started).

For one of the raised beds last year we used garden soil (we ran out of multipurpose compost) which wasn’t as good as the compost filled ones that you could put your hand in to see if there was any spuds forming on the potato plants there. You can’t do that with our London clay soil. so we dug that out and put compost in.

Today we got up early and started off a few seeds in an old propagator which was collecting leaf mould and soil at the bottom of the garden but after a wash was ready to go and now on the kitchen windowsill. We sowed a couple of different types of chillies, thyme, basil, chamomile, dyers chamomile and Medwyn’s free gift earlier this year, some “Trial seed longest Leeks” (pic below). We’ll keep you posted.

We also stuck some polythene on top of the raised beds (pic above) as we did last year and will give the soil a couple of weeks to warm up before trying a couple of seed potatoes in very early. The season has started for us now. Has anyone else made a start on the garden this weekend? If so let us know and send us some pics.

And for no reason at all, a couple of King Tubby’s dubplate mixes that we’d put up before and no doubt put up again.