Welcome to the Timber Garden blog, a blog for cold-hardy gardeners.  This blog is meant to be a resource for the people who just can’t help but plant things in high-elevation, short-season gardens and greenhouses.  If your growing season is roughly 60 days, read on.

McCall, location in the West Central Mountains of Idaho, has an average final frost date at the beginning of July and an average first frost in late August.  The degree day heat units are 950 between April and October,  which is nearly half the units anywhere else in the state.  So your plants had better have laser focus all ‘summer’.

While there are a lot of challenges to gardening here (ravenous deer, frosts in mid-July, the secret vole army), there are benefits too!  You can grow cool-season crops straight through the summer without worrying about bolting.  Our perennials are blanketed by protective snow in the winter, and we don’t get the chilling, dry winds of southern Idaho.  There are fewer insect pests.  There are dozens of plants that are well suited to this area.  You can grow enough berries, snap peas, and mushrooms to make a melon farmer from Hagerman weep with envy.

2020 will be our 8th year of growing tomatoes in McCall.  More about us here.

We occasionally have great guest posts from fellow Master Gardeners! It gives a better picture of the different soils and microclimates in the valley, plus we all love to see what our fellow gardeners are up to!

I hope these pages will be a good resource, and we appreciate feedback! Let us know what varieties you’ve grown, or the plants you grow in your garden year after year! Ask questions and get feedback from our great little garden community!

-Sam