Some of you may have noticed the odd reference at the end of last week's post on gardening Christmas cards - a reminder to myself that I forgot (hah!) to remove (and no, it's not there any more). In a troll for suitable festive designs I'd come across Hoe Hoe Hoe by Martin Rolfe, which he designed to raise money for Thrive last year. It's a shame it's no longer available.
All is not lost, though, if you like Martin's work. as over at Martin's Online Sketch Book (where you can see lots of his watercolours), he's offering to create a cartoon to your brief for the astonishingly good value of £5. So, something of Husband wrapping his banana, perhaps? (That's banana plant. For winter. Honestly, some people!) Now, wouldn't that make a lovely, personal Christmas present?
This probably isn't what you want to hear, but Christmas cards have to be bought some time.
It's thoughtful to give cards that reflect the interests of the person receiving it - or, failing that, fun to send something that you particularly like. It's surprisingly difficult, though, to find any aimed specifically at gardeners,
For Christmas cards with a gardening theme, check out Thrive's website. (Thrive is a charity working in social and therapeutic horticulture.) Their "Christmas Thyme" design is exclusive to them, but I particularly liked their well dressed shed.
Perennial has a much wider range of cards, to support their work with distressed professional horticulturalists. They've got quite a mix of gardening and non-gardening subjects and, again, I fell for the shed (pictured).
This Festive Garden Christmas card from the British Heart Foundation has a cheerful ambiance, but you might have spotted in the past that I have a particular soft spot for the humorous cartoons of Chris Madden which you buy under licence to produce yourself (a quick glance at his terms indicate a £15 rate for personal use). His website is much easier to navigate now, and he's got a good array of Christmas gardening subjects.
Where did the time go? Can't believe I haven't posted yet this month. To come back with a bang, I thought you'd enjoy this film. It's priceless. And all power to Claire, who produces the lovely Claire's Allotment videos.
There's more about electric buttons below, but first, let's see how Claire braved the unknown, all in the name of blogging. As far as the rest of us are concerned - there's a lot to be said for vicarious experience!
So, rather Claire than me! Apparently, they can also make you produce a lot of saliva, which must be quite fetching with all that anaesthesia going on.
Electric Daisies are enjoying a bit of publicity at the moment, and are also known as Electric Buttons and, in the States, as Szechuan or Sansho Buttons. This is what James Wong says on his website about what them:
This fizzy 'space dust'-like effect - which my mates liken to licking a 9 volt battery - is produced by the pain-relieving agent spilanthol, which has meant that the plant has been traditionally used to treat toothache, mouth ulcers & sore throats for centuries. Spilanthol's muscle relaxing effects have even meant that an extract of the plant has found it's way into high-end face creams that claim to have a natural 'botox' effect.
In fact, the plant Acmella oleracea (syn. Spilanthes oleracea) is indeed known as the Toothache Plant.
I can't help feeling that the main application is medicinal, and herb expert Isabell Shipard gives instructions for use on toothache, mouth ulcers, cuts and acne. (No one mentions whether they'd be useful for anyone with Sjorgen's Syndrome, but it sounds possible.) But that hasn't stopped bright sparks thinking of ways to inflict them on the public.
In an NPR broadcast from 2009 Keith Dusko, director of operations for Haru, a chain of restaurants in New York, Boston and Philadelphia, described how he'd added them to cocktails, and a Washington DC chef was about to add them to a curry dish. A gimmick, if ever I heard one. But if he hasn't already, I'm willing to bet that our own Heston Blumenthal will experiment with possibilities.
Here's a chance to listen to what happened when programme presenter Robert Smith decided to have a whole one, and the explanation of spilanthol's effect on the trigeminal nerve.
Incidentally, if you actually do want to grow these little electric zingers, you can get them from Suttons.
Have your courgettes got away from you? There's usually one, isn't there? You'd swear it wasn't there at all, then you wander around the garden with an idle coffee in hand and come across this enormous Zeppelin that has apparently landed overnight.
Last spring I gathered together some songs that you might be tempted to hum in the veg garden. Since then, I've been in touch with Lisa who runs the lovely Turning Earth blog from her Yorkshire garden. It's really worth a visit, especially if you're looking for help on a particular type of planting, such as on walls, in shade, for foliage, for scent, all advice drawn from her experience in her Yorkshire garden.
Lisa remembered a super little song from her parents' record collection,which she enjoyed as a child, "aware that he was probably being a bit rude, in that rather innocent "Carry On" films way". Well, we all know what courgettes grow up to be, if we don't catch them in time. Enjoy.
Just a reminder, in case, like me, you're always thinking "Ooh, I'd like to do that" and then forgetting to note down dates.
The Cartoon Museum's exhibition of H M Bateman runs until 22nd July. Still time to to catch a super show, with some chuckle-worthy garden references.
In this one - The Rollers, from The Strand Magazine 1933 - note how the skinny little gardener is making up for the lack of his neighbour's bulk with a great big roller. Or is he just skinny because of all that energy expended?
I could make a cheap female jibe about men and their equipment, but I won't.
Cartoonists are visual poets. They speak volumes with an economy of expression. It hasn't always been like this. Nineteenth-century cartoons, à la Punch, tended to be illustrations to lengthy jokes, captioned beneath.
Henry Mayo Bateman (1887-1970) helped change all that and the exhibition that's just opened at The Cartoon Museum goes a fair way to proving their claim that he was "the first modern master of twentieth-century cartooning".
I've been familiar with Bateman for many years - especially his painfully observed strip "It's All in the Game", of a cricketer self-importantly arranging his wicket only to be bowled out (and over) on his very first ball.
Husband knew nothing about Bateman, and was bowled over himself, when we visited the museum last week. Bateman has an acute feel for society's mores and characters.
As the sowing season swings into action, are you humming something suitable as you tease out tomato seeds, lay out lettuces, and bed down beetroot? Do you know any songs about vegetables?
After all, music overflows with references to flowers. Songs mentioning roses alone would take several pages - think Bette Midler (The Rose), Poison (Every Rose has its Thorn), Nat King Cole (Ramblin' Rose) and of course Hank Williams Jnr's inspiration for many a Valentine message. I could go on.
Gardens feature frequently, from Old-Fashioned Garden, supposed to be Cole Porter's first smash hit in 1919 (hear it sung, read the lyrics), through English Country Garden (of which Rolf Harris did an odd acerbic version) to all those that use the garden as a metaphor for heaven, such as the lovely In the Garden (here by Elvis). In fact, the Guardian's music blog did a readers' round-up of recommended "garden" songs which included none of these last November.
But vegetables? Well, extensive research has revealed that, indeed, there are songs about vegetables. Unsurprisingly, they tend to fall into the "novelty" category, which can be the only way to describe The Eggplant the Ate Chicago, or the inventive Barnyard Dance (aka The Vegetable Song), sung by the Squirrel Hillbillies (which pretty much tells you all you need to know about the style).
Here's the winner, though, awarded with the bias of moderately enthusiastic fan. Even so, I hadn't come across it before. If you like it enough, you can even download a ring-tone. Sit back and enjoy John Denver's Home Grown Tomatoes.
(Incidentally, there must be others. If you know other veggie songs, do tell us about it below.)
Here's a bit of fun for a Friday afternoon. The Dabbler is an addictive blog with the extra allure of purporting to be for "Connoisseurs of Everything". And, of course, if you're reading Weeding the Web, then you are most definitely a connoisseur, aren't you?
Now that gardening is such a worthy pastime, it's always in need of humour, and Frank Key, who writes the equally addictive Hooting Yard, contributes (do click through to it on the following link) with his take on the young Ruskin, who as I'm sure you know, once wrote:
“I was extremely fond of digging holes, but that form of gardening was not allowed.” Praeterita, Volume I, Ruskin's memoirs of his early life.
With the thought that flowers and vegetables aren't the only things growing larger in the garden at the moment, here's a fun alternative to All Things Bright and Beautiful that I found on the Gardenerstalk website and forum. With thanks to Nigel Phillips who lets me reproduce it here. Go on, sing it through and have a giggle.
The Gardener’s Hymn
All things bright and beautiful, all creatures great and small All things wise and wonderful, the Lord God made them all.
But what we never mention, though gardeners know it’s true Is when He made the goodies, He made the baddies too.
All things spray and swattable, disasters great and small All things paraquatable, the Lord God made them all.
The greenfly on the roses, the maggots in the peas, Manure that fills our noses, He also gave us these.
The fungus on the goose-gogs, the club root on the greens, The slugs that eat the lettuce and chew the aubergines.
The drought that kills the fuchsias, the frost that nips the buds, The rain that drowns the seedlings, the blight that hits the spuds.
The midges and the mosquitoes, the nettles and the weeds, The pigeons in the green stuff, the sparrows on the seeds.
The fly that get the carrots, the wasp that eats the plums, How black the gardener’s outlook, though green may be his thumb.
But still we gard'ners labour, midst vegetables and flowers, And pray that what hits neighbours, will somehow bypass ours.
In my post Cutting off the Rhubarb's Flower Bud: what are we missing? I included a picture of said flower and pointed out that it wasn't really worth the wait. The other reason you shouldn't let your rhubarb flower is that it could well be the end of the plant.
Which is what happened to mine. The plant pictured died down for winter, never to be seen again. It had always been a weakling anyway, being Glaskins Perpetual grown from seed.
It takes some time for seed-grown rhubarb to bulk up enough to produce a good number of sticks (I'd personally say longer than the two years suggested on The Rhubarb Compendium, a comprehensive and excellently referenced site, but I didn't exactly cosset my plant).
We still have a plant of Glaskins Perpetual, around eight years on, and although it does now produce numerous sticks, they are spindly affairs that mean you need twice as many as you might pick from, say, a Victoria. On the whole, I'd go for planting crowns of rhubarb (that's the root part, if you're not sure), widely available in seed catalogues. Altogether more robust, producing thicker stalks.
...Landscape Juice Network
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