Retirement: One More Step

December 13th, 2022

   I reached another “maturity” milestone this fall – my official Social Security retirement age.

Young George just getting started with his journalism career. That’s a typewriter in front of him.

   That means I’m now in the dual-old-fogey class of qualifying both for Medicare and full Social Security benefits.

   It also means there’s good reason why I’m tired these days after spreading just two yards of mulch and why my back hurts after a half-hour of pulling weeds.

   As my mom would say, I’m no spring chicken anymore.

   I started to cut back on my typical 60-hour work week a few years ago when I retired from doing drawings and home-garden consults and cut back on the 40 or so talks I was doing every year.

   That’s when my wife, Sue, and I also moved to the Pittsburgh area to be closer to our grandkids.

   Now that I’ve crossed the Social Security waypoint, it’s time to throttle back a bit more.

   After next year’s April 29-May 11 trip to Portugal, I’m going to drastically cut back on the number of gardening trips I’ve been leading for the last 15 or so years for Lowee’s Group Tours.

   We were doing as many as 17 trips a year before COVID, but there’s no way I can keep up that pace. Driving in from Pittsburgh even before a trip goes out has made trip-leading even more tiring.

   The five weekday tours we do every year to the Philadelphia Flower Show are doable, so I plan to keep scheduling those.

   And I may be up for doing a multi-day trip once or twice a year, especially if I can hop on board in or close to Pittsburgh.

   But sorry to say, I’m going to give up the international trips and most of the day tripping we’ve done to great local home gardens as well as to the many amazing public gardens within day-trip range of Harrisburg.

   The trips generated a lot of “regulars” over the years, many of whom have become more like old friends and gardening buddies than just passengers. I’ll miss seeing you and your smiling faces on the bus.

Here’s our group that just got done touring a Norwegian fjord in 2018.

   We’ve been to some amazing places… the colorful bulb fields of the Netherlands, the immaculate formal gardens of northern Italy, and England’s historic Chelsea Flower Show, to name just a few.

   If you want to see pictures of some of our past trips, check out the Photo Galleries section of my website for shots from 42 trips – ranging from local to worldwide.

   My wife, Sue, (who apparently still has more energy than me), is planning to do a trip or two of her own with Lowee’s. One she has in mind is a trip next June 1-6 to see some of the top gardens of North Carolina, including a pair of spectacular home gardens down that way. Stay tuned for details on that when they’re ready. Otherwise, keep ogling those gardens without me so long as your backs, legs, eyes, and budgets allow!

   The other area where I’m going to scale back is in my website writing. Although I plan to keep this site going as long as I can, I’ve decided that starting next year, I’ll write new posts every other week instead of every week.

   For more than 20 years, I’ve been posting a new article almost every Tuesday. That’s a lot of words.

   Once my four-part best-new-plants series of 2023 finishes in early February, I’ll post something new every other Tuesday. And instead of sending out an email roundup of my writings every two weeks to subscribers, I’ll switch to monthly email “blasts.”

   If you run into any withdrawal symptoms, hit the Storage Shed button along the left side of this page and you’ll get a list of past posts.

   You could also type in any topic of your interest in the search box near the top right here (or in any search engine) to see if I’ve written anything about it already. Odds are pretty good since I’ve covered just about everything garden-related over the past 30 years.

   A third option that might keep you occupied for awhile is the George’s Handy Lists section. This is where I’ve archived more than 60 assorted lists, such as “Bottom 10 Trees,” “10 Murphy’s Laws that Apply to Gardening,” and “10 Things My Wife Makes Fun of Me For (Gardening Only).”

A writer, first and foremost.

   One area where I’m not cutting back is my year-round, weekly posts for The Patriot-News and its PennLive.com website. That’s where I started my garden-writing career and where I hope to keep going until senility… unless the paper has other ideas sooner. (I’m one of the few writers left there from the 1980s.)

   Writing, after all, is what I was trained to do (B.A. journalism, Penn State, 1978) and it’s still what I like to do best. Leading trips, talking to garden clubs, designing gardens, and doing videos somehow got added along the way.

   Most everything I write for the Patriot/PennLive is different from what I post here, although sometimes I’ll overlap with “newsy” items or tag-team different angles on a similar topic.

   If you want to check out what I write there, it shows up in the Gardening pages of PennLive.  Note that some of the PennLive writings are geared to subscribers only, meaning you have to be a paid PennLive or Patriot-News subscriber to access them.

   The stuff on my website is always free and open to everyone anytime. I have no plans to charge for that. But I am looking forward to my first Social Security check.