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.