The allotment is all looking very pretty and springy. The daffodils are all starting to open up and there’s a single magnificent red and yellow tulip. In the next allotment over, the blossom is looking lovely.
We’ve put the very first things in the ground. It’s still a little early by all accounts (Leeds’ last frost is the first week of May!) but I’m a bit impatient. So I’ve sown some radishes. Just a few, in two neat little rows. We’ll see if they actually come to anything in the next couple of weeks.
This weekend we’ve done lots more digging!
We got another bed dug (bed #9), took a trip to some garden centres and did more digging! Bed #7 is also looking good now. The piles of drying weeds is growing bigger and bigger.
We’ve done some digging! We’ve drawn some diagrams and portioned our allotment up into a number of beds. We’ve marked some of them out with pegs and string. And now we’ve dug the first one over.
What a lot of dandelion roots! This is bed 8. Not sure yet what its going to have in it.
It starts today! After roughly a year on the waiting list for Burley Model Allotments we’ve been invited inside and offered a plot. Plot number 119a is ours!
As might be expected, I hadn’t really got started on 2021 music for much of January. So instead, most of this mix is made up of a lot of new discoveries of old music, a few relistens (RIP DOOM) and just a couple of truly new tracks.
So here we go…
Attica Blues - Deeper starts us off. I love trip hop but its a bit before my time so I’ve never been very knowledgeable about it. Didn’t know Attica Blues at all until Gilles Peterson played them earlier this year.
Next up is a double bill of MF DOOM tracks to go with the sad news on NYE that he’d died last year. It’s hard to pick out specific tracks - I feel Doom works function much better as whole album that little snippets - but I’ve picked a couple anyway. First up is Viktor Vaughn - A Dead Mouse from the Vaudeville Villain album, one that I didn’t really know very well but listed to a lot in January. Followed by Madvillain - Figaro, a classic piece of one of his most loved albums.
I don’t know if its escapism from the grey cold weather or escapism from the grey cold lockdown but I’ve been listening to a lot of reggae lately, a lot of whch has come from David Rodigan’s excellent shown on BBC 1XTRA. So here’s a triple of reggae cuts. First up is The Loving Paupers - Enemy of History. They’re a contemporary New York band and their whole 2019 album, Lines, is great but this is my favourite track. After that’s its Macka B - Gentrification a brand new track I’ve enjoyed a lot and then Mafia & Fluxy - Horns of Jah Children, a lovely re-recording of a clasic tune.
By far the oldest track on this month’s playlist is Roberta Flack’s Compared To What. It’s another Gilles Peterson discovery that he played for its 60th anniversary and I just found myself singing over the following days.
Kruder & Dorfmeister brings us back to the 2020s, although it doesn’t sound like it. I didn’t really start listening to the dusty sounding beats on their 2020 album 1995 until the start of this year but its a firm favourite from start to finish. It’s a similar story with the next track from Four Tet - Parallel 4. Parallels came out right at the end of lasy year but I didn’t really get to it until the first couple of weeks of January. Great stuff.
The last pair up the ante a bit. We have the fab squelchy, bassy stomp of Danny Breaks’ - The Jellyfish, an early 2000s track I listened to on repeat this month (need to check out more Danny Breaks!) and then the only true 2021 album of the lot: from Isles we have Bicep - Saku. There was some serious hype around this album and it was well justified, the whole LP is incredible. A strong early contended for AOTY 2021!