06/12/2016 TimberGardener

June 11th, 2016, a hive of bees arrived at our house! Our friend Tim is lending us a hive and we’ve sworn to protect it from bears, bugs and mice this summer. We’re hoping it will help pollinate the garden, and there are a lot of plants currently in bloom!…

06/11/2016 TimberGardener

When the snow finally melted off the garden this spring, we could see our raised beds with heaped piles of mulch on top. We set out to get the beds ready to plant, distributing the big pile of straw and manure and composted plant parts from the previous year that…

06/11/2016 TimberGardener

Utah Honeysuckle (Lonicera utahensis) If you’ve ever walked through the woods near McCall, ID, you’ve probably seen several honeysuckle varieties growing wild. The distinctive red twinberry, or Utah Honeysuckle (Lonicera utahensis) looks like two translucent fish eggs glued together. The black twinberry (Lonicera involucrata) looks like…

06/04/2016 TimberGardener

The straw bales and raised beds, spring 2015. The first year we had our garden was 2015, and we soon ran out of dirt to beg, borrow, buy, or steal (okay, we’ve never stolen dirt…only sand). Instead of a fourth raised bed we tried straw bale…

06/04/2016 TimberGardener

In 2015 I posted that you should never purchase raspberries because they are probably invading someone else’s home and garden. I didn’t expect it to happen to me so soon, but I had sprouts coming up that fall. Now they are coming up in the path, in the former rhubarb…

06/04/2016 TimberGardener

Last weekend we started building a kiwi trellis. Most people’s reaction to this is “Inside your greenhouse?” or “Inside your actual house with that fig you’re going to kill eventually?” or just “WHAATT?” But the kiwi endeavor, unlike the fig tree or the maypop vine, might actually be successful. When…