Happy New Year to all, first time I've grown hellebore plants for winter flowers, and I look forward to seeing the first blooms in 2021!

With all the craziness in the world now, here's a little beauty to help bring you peace and happiness today. These late-season flowers are sure keeping my honeybees happy. They particularly like the Black-Eyed Susans!

On this, the hottest day of the year thus far in the Pacific Northwest, with temperatures hovering near 100 degrees, it's just turned out to be too much for one of my bee hives. They are all hanging out on the front of the hive, in a behavior known as "bearding." It looks intimidating, but I can walk right up to the hive in a pair of shorts to take a picture. Once the temperature goes down, they will all go back inside like good little bees.

This gorgeous flower bloomed today in a pot on my back deck. These are absolutely stunning! Especially to an astro photographer like me...

This dude was chillin' in the middle of the road during a thunderstorm, I moved him to the shoulder.

I put up a new birdhouse on the property (with a cam right along beside it, of course) and got this picture on the first day! No one has moved into the bird house (that I know of) but there were several birds checking it out. This particular one spent quite a bit of time flying around the birdhouse and landed on the front perch several times to give it a closer look!

Living in the Pacific Northwest, a common rule of thumb is that you wait to set your plants out over the Mother's Day weekend. By then, the odds are very good that you are past the last freeze and your plants will be okay. By the Memorial Day weekend, though, usually two to three weeks later, weeds have taken root and it's time to do some serious weeding. I can't remember a Memorial Day weekend that didn't involve some heavy weeding, and this year was no exception.

Most people don't think of peas as being a beautifully flowered garden plant but it is! As an aside, many people don't realize that peas are legumes - and many legumes have spectacular flowers. Of them, peas and Scarlet Red Runner beans are the two varieties that I particularly enjoy when they are blooming. This is a photo I got in the garden after noticing the blooms on my sweet peas opening up. 

What's not to love about these photos we keep getting from our bird house cam? This cam is mounted less than a foot away from a very active bird house on our garden shed and the pictures we get are amazing!

Wow, not only is arugula my favorite herb in the mustard family, who knew it had such beautiful flowers? Absolutely exquisite!