Evil Plot part III

It's been a busy gardening weeks for me. The plants are getting established and starting to mutate and have insane growth over the past 2 weeks. And with that, comes the endless battle of getting rid of weeds - or rather, not-planted-deliberately-plants.

It's been hot, sunny and smokey (forest fire about 40 km away), with an average of nearly 20 hours direct sunlight reaching the crazy plants in the crazy Evil Plot. It's safe to say that I'm seeing growth that is 2-3 times faster compared to the garden in Calgary. There's something to be said about gardening in the Sub Arctic: what short season we have is made up by the intense sunshine in summer.

Not so much rain, though. I think the garden got an average of 3mm of rain overall in the past 2 weeks. Because of that, I have to make sure that I water them thoroughly every evening, as the soil that was *given* to us in the plot is very sandy, rocky and does not hold water very well, despite the 40 bags of compost and nearly 125 litres of sphagnum moss worked in. However, one must make do with what one has.

These Bokchoys are only 5 weeks old!

Been harvesting the odd leaves when they are young. Miss me fresh Bokchoys: supermarket ones are fairly tasteless after all the transportation and refrigeration.

The spinach is going nuts, and started to bolt - the intense sun might be triggering the flowering.

Asian Purple Mustard (kinda a mutated purple Boychoy subspecies)

Swiss chards, looking ready for some leaves to be harvested

The Tomato plants are starting to flower!

Dinner is served! All sauteed in olive oil and garlic.

But when it does rain.... the Plants just Exploded! I kid you not! The leaves just widened and lengthened several cm overnight! I guess I can stop buying fresh vegetables at the store with my groceries. That's easily $50-70 per week saved (yes, I spend a LOT for vegetables, they cost an arm and a leg plus your eyes AND ears, up North).

Having some seedlings left over from my egg crate seed starter, I just had to plant them somewhere (no more space in the plot, now that the seedlings have mutated into nearly adult plants). So into pots they go, in the front yard.

A strange mosquito-like insect was on the basil plant. It was orange! Need to get me a Bug Book and see if I can identify some of the insects here. Maybe I'll discover a new species or two.... and will name name the horrible biting ones after certain people that I don't like, and the nicer useful ones after those that I do :p

One of my little Aspie quirk is I can spend hours being mesmerised by something as a drop of water beaded up on a Savoy Cabbage leaf.

The air is so smoky from the forest fire, the sun has a reddish hue, even though it's still a few hours to sunset when I took this photo.

Now, I've been weeding a lot of Chenopodium type seedlings in the past week from the Plot, without realising what they are.... now that I know, they will go into the cooking pot instead of being trampled in the footways.

Duh, me being a Goose, not recognising Goosefoot when it stared at me right on my face XD what a fail for an amateur botanist LOL.