Prog On A Friday.

 I found this fantastic video on good old You Tube recently.

It features ex Genesis axe man😀 even guitar genius:  Mr Steve Hackett and his band and Marillion lead guitarist 🎸 Steve Rothery on the Genesis track: Fly On A Windscreen.

I have featured Steve Hackett on here several times.  I have also posted on here  about his super book: A Genesis In My Bed. 

Before joining  Genesis.  He rang a NME advert for a band requiring a guitarist one night and someone called Mr Peter Gabriel answered the phone.  The rest is like they say: Prog Rock history.

Did any of you see Genesis in the early seventies?  I have always liked Steve Hackett and Peter Gabriel especially.  Not forgetting the work he's done with the English/Irish rock godess/Banshee: Kate Bush!

I saw Steve Hackett and his band with Nad Sylvan (vocalist on this video) playing his Genesis Revisited set at Cropredy festival in 2022.  I blogged about the concert which was amazing.

I first saw Steve Rothery with Marillion and rock poet Fish at Garden Party at Milton Keynes Bowl in 1986.  What a great day and line up that was.

Then I saw Marillion at The Night Of The Prog in Loreley in Germany in 2017 which I also wrote about on here.  

Steve Hogarth is the Marillion singer these days.  He's only been doing it since 1989.😀 

However he is a Red Devils supporter like myself and I am not talking about Salford Rugby League Club.  Or maybe I should do?  

Why couldn't the Caraboa Cup have been replayed at Old Trafford.  Grimsby would have had a kings 🤴 ransom share of the gate receipt and United might have won?🤔  

Any way or any road.  This 61 year old and several months will soon be going to Blighty to see them again in late September.  I hope they  do some early Marillion stuff like Script For A Jesters Tear or Misplaced Childhood...

It will be time for donning my shorts and showing off my donkey knees and a few days roughing it on one of my rock festival trips, Wetherspoons (cheap real ales and Cornish cider) and pasties.

Enjoy the track:

You can't beat some prog rock can you?

Have a great weekend🍺👍.

Shoulders Of Pork And Ham And Spam. Oh And The Price Of It!

 Another what we are having for our tea tonight or had for our tea last night post.  This time it's a Lidl version of Spam.

Apparently shoulders of pork and ham is where the word spam comes from.  Rather like the laboratories of New York and London jointly invented NYLON.

 On further Google research.  Spam was invented by Hormel Foods and Jay Hormel in 1937.

It was created to utilize Pork shoulder which was not a popular cut of meat at the time.

"Spam" is believed to be a combination of the words: "Spiced and ham".

My email often says: nothing in spam.

But I think there is.  Especially if you eat it!

The price of petrol station ⛽️  Spam.

We spotted this when fuelling up a few weeks ago in County Kerry.  I thought it a tad bit dear.

I remember Spike Milligan writing ✍️ in his book My Part in Hitler's Downfall.  He was serving in north Africa in the middle of a jungle.  He walked into an Arabic tent cafe  in the jungle and said to the waiter: "Spam and chips twice please!"

Do you like Spam or Shoulders Of Pork And Ham?

This sketch is over fifty years old.  1970 in fact.

You learn something new everyday. 😀

Could this be my blog post magnum opus?  Or even a Spam magnum opus? 

Reacquainted With An Old Gardening Work Mate.

One thing that I know when am gardening.  If I lose something eventually it will turn up.

It could be days, weeks, months or even years.  But eventually I will find my lost item of gardening equipment.

I have moaned and ranted on here before  about why don't garden tool manufacturers paint everything bright pink or red instead of green or brown?  Green and brown are natural habitat colours.  

If you don't want them to get camouflaged paint them in bright colours .  I have a pair of red handled loppers and I find them in seconds.  My green or black handled loppers can take me five to ten minutes to find.  Perhaps they think if we paint them green or brown the gardeners will lose them and buy new ones?  It's  the garden equivalent of The Man In The White Suit.

Secateurs are another one of my how to lose garden specialities.  I have dug up a few rusty pairs in the compost heaps  in my time.

These days I only buy cheap secateurs from a car boot sale or Lidl.  I know they will either break or lose them.

Any road or any way.  I was digging out some fym the other day for my raised beds and I uncovered the top of a big black tree plant pot.

They are briiant for putting weeds or  small stones in.  I bought the said plant bucket for five Euros a couple of years ago from a carboot sale.  It's  been used hundreds of times and I found it very useful.

I managed to eventually uncover and dig round the pot and prize it from it's fym prison.

Here it is for your perusal:

My old friend.  Big black bucket!  Or if it was in Keeping Up Appearances: Black bouquet.

Do you lose your gardening tools in the garden, but you know they will turn up some time?

You know you have been writing blogs for over fifteen years and you can find an old tree plant bucket interesting enough to write about.  Perhaps I am turning into an Eric Olthwaite and could write about ' interesting' coal shovels?😊

Still Got It.

 I never went to Cropredy or A New Day Festival this year.  Thankfully though I can watch some of the great You  Tube videos that other kind festival punters have recorded for the world wide web.

Here's Robert Plant from Cropredy a couple of weeks ago.  He was a special guest for the Deborah Bonham Band.  Yes you're right.  Debby is the late and great Led Zeppelin drummer's John's sister.

Robert Plant still seems to have got it!  What a magnificent voice:

Any one else planning on going or been to any rock festivals this summer?

It's  been brilliant weather the spring and summer of 2025.  The best ever me thinks 🤔  

A Scene From The Cuttings Floor.

The crowded floor of my proposed new potting shed/ man cave.

People have been very busy lately and my new potting shed seems to have been put on hold.

This plantaholic however decided to press on with my plant propagation area.

I took a piece of old polytunnel plastic and laid it on the ground to hopefully suppress any pernicious weeds.  Then I moved some small patio flags and pig slats to make a level ("ish") area to place my potting bench/ tables on.

Bob's your uncle!  I have a new area to take cuttings and divide plants and start veg seeds off.

I am not buying potting compost at the moment.   Instead I am experimenting with my potting mix.

Sand, home made compost and topsoil all combine.  I even place cuttings in just sand.

So what cuttings are you taking Dave?  Good question Dave.

I have been cutting back Shasta Daisies. Taking cuttings about a pencil length long.  Removing any leaves except a couple at the top which I could in half.  Then I get about ten cuttings to a large plant pot.

Of course I could divide the Daisies in September or next spring but I get great pleasure in seeing roots and leaves appear.

I will buy some good potting compost before they stop selling it for winter and pot them on individually.

I have also been taking Osteospermums (Cape Daisies) cuttings and dividing Bergenias and small Phormiums.

I water them most mornings at the moment.  But we are starting to get dews.  We even lit the stove in the front room last night and we weren't roasting.

My new potting shed floor is getting full already.  Soon they will be going outside into the plant nursery in the veg plot.

This is how I use to propagate my plants before I got my polytunnels which alas are no more.

I hope we get the sides and roof on before the Irish monsoon and gale season begins.

Are you propagating plants or making a potting shed/ greenhouse or polytunnel?

 

"Bye Jove He's Got It".

A bag of cheap discount supermarket daffodils.

I never thought any of our lads would become obsessed with gardening like yours truly and me, myself and I.

Number 2 son moved a couple of hours away last year.

We weren't happy bunnies and it's the same feeling most parents have to experience and all little birds have to fly the nest some time.

One day we visited them and somehow I was talked into digging off a big border of gravel courtesy of a borrowed shovel from next door and pulling up a big sheet of polythene.  The gravel was deposited on top of gravel on another border.

I pulled out any weeds and was impressed with the rich and fertile soil.  He was going to make a flower garden.

I visited him again and gave him the left over plants from a close by car boot sale we had just visited.  Then we arranged them on the border and guess who got the job of planting them?

He also bought bedding plants and a rose tree and we gave him some more plants.  Especially my Cape Daisies and Shasta Daisies.  Daisies are my plant autograph and you always know when I have planted up a garden.  It will contain my Daisies. 

He purchased some ornamental bark and a lot of his neighbours commented on his 'new' garden and how they would like a garden like it.

He's actually taken an interest in gardening and he even grew lettuce in a hanging basket.

I can't persuade him to put his name down for an allotment yet but he does want to container garden next year and grow vegetables.

Now we text each other about his garden and the latest plant offers in Aldi or Lidl.

I told him he could get a big bag of daffodils from Lidl for ten Euros.  

The other day he drove home and presented me with a quarter of a bag of daffodils.  He said he'd got tired planting his ones.

I have planted them in one of my old decking plank raised beds.

When I was planting them I thought:

"Bye Jove He's Got It!"

At least one of our lads like gardening!
 

When You Plant A Buddleia You Get Yourself A Butterfly 🦋 Bush.

 

Butterflies and Buddleia. 

The 🦋 🦋 butterflies love the Buddleia that I planted to make our patio a bit more private last year. You can see the bay and Beara in the background.  We live in the countryside next to the sea.

Regular readers will know this particular shade of purple/ lilac specimen is an offspring of a Buddleia  cutting I took when I lived in Cheshire.   I filled two wheelie bins full of my shrubs and perennials and manhandled it into the back of a Luton hire van.  

Last year I planted another cutting that had successfully "striked" rootsand now it's attracting the Red Admirals.

When I was trying to sell my Buddleia and other plants at a carboot sale the other week.

I had a conversation with a lovely lady and I told her about the Buddleia or butterfly bush.  I told her if she planted it in her garden it would attract the butterflies 🦋.   Then I said that apparently that butterflies serve no natural purpose other than being beautiful.  We both agreed what could be better than that?  She bought my potted Buddleia and went away happy.

My Sedum Autumn Joy's are now turning pinky purple.  These also attract the butterflies.  Sadly when I see these in flower and the butterflies hovering round them.  I know winter is on the way.  Rather like seeing farmers making second or third cut bales of silage.  So the cattle will have forage in winter. 

Anyone getting lots of butterflies on their Buddleias?

Here's a song by American heavy rock  band Heart.  I saw them play at Birmingham NEC back in the late eighties.  I think it was 1988🤔? Crikey!  That is thirty seven years ago.  Where does the time go?