Chris Ransick

What passes for intensity in an Apis mellifera? 

I know she's blurry, but that just serves to capture the moment as this honeybee comes in for a landing on a spread of Valerian blooms. Take one look in her eye and you'll have the answer to the question. In fact, I've never seen a honeybee look anything but intense, at least not during the month of June. There's just too much work to be done.

Come late September, these creatures grow sluggish. It may be exhaustion, or just old age. I'll stop short of projecting human emotions on this insect, but when I encounter bees at the edge of the frost zone and watch them climb through spent greenery in a desultory search, I think of nothing so much as resignation. I can look forward to ski season; the bee, not so much.

Hence, intensity. Things are blooming; there's work to be done, and done right now.

From the bee's-eye view, this budding dill blossom bespeaks anticipation. It's a meal in preparation; it's sex on a stick, bulging under the aromatic, fern-like leaves I'll soon gather and dry. In the meantime, I take great pleasure in getting down to the level of the bee and visiting the natural architecture of the plant. By tomorrow, that structure will have changed, burgeoned out in shape and purpose. Only close observation is rewarded.

The June garden is full of such transitory pleasures. Here we are leaving the penumbra of summer solstice, phasing toward the heat of July and the promised "monsoon" season of the American Southwest, with its blazing morning sun and big-shouldered afternoon clouds that unleash torrents and finish with rainbows.

Eggplants, chili peppers, and summer squash are all fruiting up, and of course, the early tomatoes. Note the precise moment in time captured here as the dessicated blossom, its purpose served, hangs by the thinnest thread from the bulging green fruit. Moments after I snapped this photo, the thread gave way in a breeze. A garden is in constant flux.

I put in five hours on the patch yesterday—the kind of spending of energy that ultimately returns energy. It was sensory overload—the scents of the herbs and flowering plants, the taste and texture of the sugarpod peas and strawberries I grazed, the interplay of light and color from all angles, the soft swarming of bees in the just opened blossoms of carrot plants.

When I knocked off work around 2 p.m., the hot Colorado sun finally driving me out of the rows, I sat back with a cold, home-brewed Bock and felt pleasantly tired and stimulated. Maybe that's akin to the reverie of the bee.

The best time to harvest wild garlic—I'm experimenting with that. This pearly white head, no bigger than the tip of my thumb, burst with flavor. We all chewed a clove—mild heat and garlic tang, then a sweetness.

My source said wait until the stalks, which emerge curled, fully straighten. I picked four heads that were the  first to do it and then let them dry a couple of days until their outer layers were a papery. It may be best to give these several days before you mash them into a salsa or sauce, but as an object in the hand, they are  beautiful to behold—every bit as enticing an image as a tenacious ladybug on the sheepwire.

This year's garden is chock full of these wonderful creatures. I find them on leaves on fencing on stems in bright sun and dim pockets. I've actually watched a ladybug, male or female I'll never know, chew its way through an of aphid, which caused me to actually speak aloud a thank you.

It's a challenge to establish a fully functioning organic garden with beneficial insects in balance with pests. Great care must be taken with soils, garden waste, and remedies for pests. I use only mild soap to combat a stubborn infestation of aphids or flea beetles, the two main troublemakers in my vegetable garden. Now, 20 years into this particular patch of garden, I have good balance: a healthy population of ladybugs to clean up the neighborhood and pollinators to make an orgy of the place on summer afternoons.

We've wallowed in strawberries over the last two weeks. As I've said before, I bring a cup of water to the patch and I sit with my wife and each eat a handful of the most delicious, tart-sweet wild strawberries to mark summer solstice. The present moment is the best, eh?

But the garden changes. The strawberries will soon taper off, even as the golden pod peas come in.

The violet and white blossoms sport a yellow eye and from that bursts the thin, sweet pea. Few make it to the house—we simply graze them for a snack. They'll peak in a week or so and then taper off as June turns to July heat.

The first tomato fruits are setting up well—marble-sized green fruits breaking out on the Bloody Butcher vines. A half dozen other varieties are in hot pursuit, the plants now rising 2-3' high and in need of tethering to a good stake or trellis.

When will the first ones ripen? I suspect before another month passes we'll have an early wave off these first bushes, and then the 18 plants I've got (count 'em, baby) will go big. I'll pull full baskets of fruit out, maybe 12-15 lbs, all through August. Those we don't eat fresh we'll skin, de-seed, and chop before freezing. Talk to me in January when I pull several pounds out as the base for a marinara sauce.

For now, though, it's about patience and persistence. The eggplant blossoms are setting and the Italian pole beans look intensely focused on climbing high up the tripod trellis.

Perhaps best of all, I took out my molcajete today--a broad lavastone mortar and pestle. Soon I'll be able to roast some of those garlic and mash them into paste, then mash in some chili peppers and have the base for a fresh salsa.

It's been, so far, a fantastic early growing season on the Front Range. The one brief hail last week didn't devastate and the warm nightime temps—up to 60 degrees or more—are setting the whole garden afire with fruit. It's a beautiful thing to behold.