About the Timber Garden

We have been gardening in McCall since 2013. We purchased a house and 3 acres outside of town in October of 2014. We couldn't wait to put in a permanent garden and fruit trees! We had both grown up gardening with our families. We'd tried to grow something wherever we lived...window herbs in Dallas, a container garden in Honolulu, an incredibly successful sprawling tomato jungle in southern Idaho.
McCall is different. Pessimists will tell you the growing season is only 60 frost free days. Optimists swear it is at least 90 days. As if the zone 3 weather wasn't enough, an army of deer lurk in the shadows, waiting for the perfect time to attack your plants. And it's not just bites taken out of your favorite veggies...no, they have to wrestle them to the ground, shaking all the fruit off with their tiny deer hooves. After the Container Garden Incident of 2014, we vowed to keep those sneaky Cervidaes out permanently...with a 7 and a half foot fence.
The first spring at our new house we built a 30' by 60' deer-proof enclosure and a greenhouse (which makes our garden area bigger than our house). We put in 9 fruit trees and started loads of berries and rhubarb. We didn't think the garden would do much the first year, but we ended up preserving a lot of food!
In 2016 we added sweet cherry trees, Asian pear trees and a cold-hardy 3-in-1 mystery apple tree. We also planted kiwis, blueberries, blackberries, and an asparagus bed.
In 2017 we'll have the full contingent of chickens, cats and worms helping us garden. We built a permanent structure for with meat chickens, and they seem to love it.
In 2018 we expanded the garden fence and added a long row of hardy cherry bushes, Nanking, Hansen, and the Romance Series from the University of Saskatchawan. We also started 3 espaliered apricots.
In 2019 we continued adding fruit trees, put in a garden bar surrounded by edible plants, and bought our first bee hive. We've had bees stay with us during the summer before, but these were the first we owned and overwintered in McCall. 2019 was also the year of obsessive pollinator perennial planting...and I got a little obsessed with dahlias and peonies.
In 2020 we got a second hive and built a towering bee platform to keep them safe from bears! We are also trying a few turkeys for fall once the coop has room. Fun new plant varieties include arctic raspberries and an American Cranberry.