I realised a shocking thing the other day. My son will finish high school in December this year. We all hope he’ll be leaving home for university shortly thereafter.
Next year, my teenage boy won’t be here all summer to eat vegetables.
Next year, I’ll need to plant a smaller garden, or be completely overwhelmed with food we can’t eat.
This is the last summer I will ever have a garden this big.
I’m having a harder time adjusting to that thought than I am the thought one of my kids will leave home in a year. Oh, I always knew that someday I’d scale back the garden, but ‘someday’ in my mind was always when I grew too old to manage so much garden.
But ‘someday’ is next year.
How am I going to cut back? Which varieties will I not plant? How will I curb my zucchini problem? What am I going to do with my time, if I’m not forced to spend every daylight hour in the garden from September to December?
It’s a good thing I have several months to prepare. This is going to take some getting used to.
Robinne Weiss 
There is no rule that you need to cut back now or soon. Grow what you want….he may come home to devour food more often than you thought…and bring friends! Grow what you want, how you want while you still can. You can always give it away to appreciative friends, the needy, a church food bank, or host more parties. I grow WAY more than the two of us need, but it doesn’t get wasted. I’ll cut back when I must physically, but I won’t be happy about it!!!
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Yes, I did consider all that. I already grow way more than we can eat, though, and have pretty well saturated my friends and neighbours. And, truth is, it would be good to do more crop rotation and have fallow periods on parts of the garden than I do now–cutting back will let me do those more effectively. It will just require a change of mindset for me. It’ll come…eventually…
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