Bees and Butterflies

Wow, let some rain fall and all blooms break out!

I did my daily walk around the garden to look for weeds and pests and what I mostly saw were bees in my fireplant (perhaps the same ones that just a week ago were finishing up the rosemary bush?), black swallowtails on my bottlebrush bush, a flycatcher in my photinia shrubs with what looked like nesting material in its beek and a dusgustingly large four-inch brown pupae of the tomato hornworm in one of the plant boxes I was cleaning out.

I planted some green pepper seeds, seeds that I collected last June. I also pulled out three dead pepper plants from last year's crop. I am still working on broadcasting seeds in that new gardenbed; what will grow will grow. I'd like to have more pepper plants this year as we seem to eat a lot of peppers. What we need are consistently warm nighttime temperatures to get all the seeds growing at once. I only have four tomato plants (out of ten planted two weeks ago) still growing.