Saturday--

Yesterday was a very busy day.  I set up the old dehydrator and I filled both it and the old one with peppermint, spearmint and oregano.  That was a good start on cutting back my herbs a bit.  I think I will trim the lavender today but that should require only one dryer.  I checked all of the plants on the fence pots.  Two were too far gone so I pulled them but the others should benefit from a bit of trimming, a deep watering, and a dose of fertilizer.  I found some pea pods developing.  I will harvest them to freeze.  The info I saw on the variety said that they are usually harvested for shelled peas but are tasty in the pod harvested young.  The plants look like they will live up to the description "high yielding."  I see a lot of flowers in addition to the pods.  The new St. John's wort and gold leaf lemon thyme are upstairs under the lights.  I transplanted them yesterday--in addition to everything else I did.  Discovered I had run out of small and medium sized permanent pots--meaning sturdy plastic or terra cotta.  I had to put them into the pots I save from garden shop transplants.

First item I saw on the news this morning covers a new academic study continuing earlier studies that we are in a "sixth" mass extinction.  I am skeptical--not about the possibility of a mass extinction under way but about whether we have the ability (or will) to stop the process.  It is mid June and I haven't seen a single bee yet--of any variety.  Last year very few honey bees visited our gardens--many fewer than the year before.  We have put up a mason bee house and I hope that it will attract some.  Not yet though.

Perhaps Perry really did mean to say "incident" instead of "accident."  However, I don't think the deliberate murder of 9 people peaceably attending a prayer service and Bible study should be diminished or marginalized by calling it an "incident."  Nor is it any kind of accident.  As a character in a disaster film I like tells a young punk: "Threatening people with a loaded gun is no accident."  It is rather like the military describing the unintentional casualties of their intentional aggression as "collateral damage."  I hate weasel words!!