Should we stay or should we go? Go, of course.

This proud sunflower came up all by itself this year. About a third of our sunflowers are, like this one, volunteers.

We're about to leave for six or seven weeks on a road trip to the east coast, including Canada's eastern provinces. After we pass Minnesota to visit family, it'll be mostly new territory, especially when we enter Canada after Michigan's Upper Peninsula. Then dip down into New Jersey to see PK's family. Excited!

On the other hand....August is pay-off time for garden work that began in early spring. This morning I harvested a dozen cantaloupes, pulled a row of onions to begin a quick "cure" in the full sun before storage, poked through the tomatoes to find the ripe ones, and snipped the glossiest eggplants and the most perfect zucchinis. The harvest box was so heavy I had to unload some on the garden's edge for a return trip. Definitely a first-world "problem."

Part of this morning's harvest included a dozen ripe melons and massive spaghetti squash.

I try not to take for granted the bounty and beauty and my good fortune. Thank you, universe. But having a wonderful home and garden isn't our only fortune, but also the ability to travel and leave behind the few green acres in which we are rooted and where we've grown and learned and raised our sons and made a home we're not ready to give up. I wonder when that day will come, as it must. As it will.

For now, we'll indulge our shared delight in travel and enjoy the best of both worlds, home in the garden and at home in the world. I think we'll do this as long as we're able and our strongest tethers aren't to the land or to wanderlust but to each other.

Later we feasted on smoked grilled veggies marinated in sesame dressing, and succulent sweet melon with fresh basil. The barbecue chicken was a bonus. 

The joy of gardening isn't just about the harvest, it's about the process and the beauty. It's about awakening with the birds and bees and butterflies. They drink the nectar, gather the pollen, and ravage (finches!) the chard and kale, and sunflower leaves. The morning light about kills me. Ditto the evening light.

It's about the intoxicating fragrance of roses and the sweet smell of crushed mint that's grown into what passes for a lawn. This morning,  a few days before our departure I ventured out to work, to harvest, to enjoy, and to assess my brain and heart about leaving at the peak of harvest.

Bottom line. I'm good with it. The garden's inevitable decline has started. The next five days are predicted to be 100-plus. I hate extreme  heat, and the garden hates it more. Leaves will curl, peppers and tomatoes without shading leaves will shrivel with sunburn, and the sunflowers will hasten to seed, much to the delight of numerous bird species.

We've hired a trusted person to harvest and give away the remaining melons and other stuff; and to harvest and freeze tomatoes from 11 plants, down from 17 plants last year! It'll all be good. It's been a process, but I know we'll drive away in a few days without looking back. If I get too lonesome, I'll just look at these pictures.

One of hundreds of bees gathering sunflower pollen. Later, when seeds form, birds will move in to harvest the seeds. We're going to miss that part of the annual garden wildlife show.

We have a great eggplant crop on four plants this year. We'll be giving most of them away, but I did manage to make some ratatouille and mix eggplant into the grilling/smoking routine.

Newly emerged sunflowers, backlit. 

Walla Walla and tropia onions curing in the sun. Tomorrow we'll need to pull the "keeper" onions to let them cure a day before we put them all on screens in the garage to dry. 

Serrano peppers ripening. Peppers of all types will remain on the plants to ripen until we return.The riper they get, the better they are, in my opinion. These will be deeply red and HOT. PK will make his famous serrano sauce.

PK checking the automatic watering system, ensuring that crops needing water will get it. 

Evening light shines through the canna lily leaves....best part of the day.

Cutting back on gardening to travel? Really?

That's me planting peppers a few weeks ago in what amounts to about a third of our too-big-for-two garden.  Photo credit - Chris Korbulic, 

In another lifetime—more than 30 years ago—I wrote a weekly column for a local paper. I could not have foreseen that one day I would be writing column-like pieces on a blog, a then-unfathomable concept, with no one cracking the editorial whip. I miss that whip! My own is made of palm fronds and peacock feathers, but I manage to produce a blog once or twice a month, and here we go.

One of those long-ago "write one no matter what" pieces was about abandoning gardening. It was composed during a mid-life crisis in the late eighties when PK and I had two kids, two jobs, an apple orchard and a significant garden. We couldn't do it all. We decided to keep the kids but ditch the garden.

I remember writing then that we still maintained a small plot, but that it was the size of a king-sized bed.

Now we've been kid-free for years, have ripped out most of the time-sucking orchard, and are fully retired with time enough to be dangerous and out of control. As a result, our 2014 garden was roughly the size of Wal Mart.

This was the July garden a few years back before we unwittingly painted our house the color of garden dirt.  (See photo below.)

We're trying to cut back. But here's the thing, especially in the Southern Oregon spring.  It feels good and right to dig in the dirt under a benevolent blue sky, to tease tenacious crabgrass roots from compacted soil, and stir composted manure into garden rows. I'm romanticizing gardening here, but only a little.

It feels good to plant the baby peppers, tomatoes and eggplants even as they tremble in the wind and suffer sunburn. Soon they will harden off and burst into pre-production vigor, only to go ballistic in August and September and shoot cannon loads of veggies into the kitchen for processing.


Now I'm complaining about abundance, which is such a ridiculous rich-white-person's non problem.

But here's the thing.  I'm struggling with how to live the last third of life—how to strike a balance between loving my home and garden while also satisfying the hunger to travel while I still can. While we still can.

Can we have it both ways? We're trying. We've planted a more modest garden,* but in a few days we're traveling for a month.

Planting a garden. Leaving for a month. What are we thinking? 

Some important adjustments have been made, especially regarding watering, which, thanks to PK, is now mostly automatic via some fancy programmable soaker hose and sprinkling doodads. A gardening friend will stop by to rescue anything that is gasping and maybe yank a few weeds.

Do we really need all these peppers, PK?  I ask in front of our home, painted the same color as our garden dirt.  But not on purpose. Photo credit: Chris Korbulic

*A more modest garden equals, in plants or rows:

• 12 tomatoes 
• 26 peppers 
• 2 zucchinis 
• 2 butternut squash
• 3 eggplants
• 12-15 cantaloupes 
• 5 basil 
• 4-6 cucumbers
• 1/8 row beets
• 1 row onions, sweets and keepers
• sunflowers and other annuals to transform the garden into a bird and bee convention center

I know. That's quite a list for a "modest garden," and the cannon will still shoot way too much into the harvest kitchen come early fall.

But change is in the air. Maybe next year I can write that we have finally pushed the reset button and are taking a year off.  

If we do take a gardening hiatus, it will be temporary, because we both love it and need it. But when it comes to size,  perhaps we'll be thinking more along the lines of  "king-sized bed" rather than Wal Mart. 

A glorious bird, bee and butterfly paradise from a few years back.   

NEXT - A month-long road trip in the Four Wheel Camper should be worth a few posts.