North Bellingham garden shines year round

ZOE FRALEY - THE BELLINGHAM HERALD

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It's nearly impossible to be all things to all people, but the sprawling north Bellingham garden of Terry and Dave Maczuga comes about as close as you can get.

There are trails for hiking, orchards of apples and nuts, abundant vegetable gardens, alpine scenery and even a few Thanksgiving turkeys and hens for eggs.

"A lot of our gardens are food gardens or native plants or ornamentals," says Terry, 50, a nursery manager at Cloud Mountain Farm. "We kind of do everything."

PHILIP A. DWYER | THE BELLINGHAM HERALD

YEAR-ROUND GARDEN TIPS
Bellingham residents Dave and Terry Maczuga offer their tips on creating a garden that is beautiful and productive all year long.
- Do your research and plan ahead. Figure out what fruits and vegetables you like and when they thrive. To avoid waste, only plant as much as you think you can eat.
- Get the timing right. "If you're going to have a year-round garden, you have to be on top of timing," Terry says. She keeps her garden schedule on Outlook to remind her when she should plant, switch crops and do garden upkeep.
- Know your basic planting times. Early spring is the biggest planting season; May and June are good for planting tomatoes and peppers; late July and August are the time to plant winter cold crops.
- For winter eating, try planting hardy vegetables such as kale, cabbage, beets and Swiss chard.
- Conifers will look good year-round, but having deciduous trees with beautiful fall color or spring blooms will help keep your interest in off seasons.

Terry has lived in the house since 1981 and used to raise animals on the land's rolling pastures. The transformation from grassy expanse into a year-round garden with depth, personality and purpose didn't really begin until Dave joined her in the early '90s.

"It's evolution. It started as a pasture with horses 15 years ago," Terry says. "It kind of snowballed in the early '90s. It started with a border, and then it grew."

"Then before we knew it, we pretty much had all of it covered," Dave says.

The couple placed trees strategically to block out the view of neighboring homes - while still giving them a peek at Mount Baker - and to protect their home from the chill of the northeast winds. Most of the trees are conifers, to keep the garden green and alive year round, which was a goal for the couple in the design of the yard.

"Most of the things we got that were deciduous had good fall color too," Dave says. "So we have a lot of maples."

Keeping the garden easy to care for and mostly organic was a priority for the couple and has played a large role in their choice of foliage.

"There is a lot of garden, but a lot of it is low maintenance," Dave says. "We work with the soil and nature and don't really go to extraordinary lengths to keep one plant or another."

The plants they do keep, though, are quite productive year-round. Their "salsa house" is a greenhouse full of peppers and tomatoes, from which they've made about 100 pints of salsa. Their apple trees yield about 1,500 pounds of fruit, which they use to make their own cider and apple sauce. They rarely have to buy fruit, jam or produce at a grocery store.

"It's very satisfying to have so much bounty from our little piece of property," Terry says.

Though it looks like it's been there for ages, even the forest is a product of the couple's care and planning. Before Dave got his hands on it, the area was one big tangle of blackberries.

"The area was solid with blackberries 10 feet high," he says. "There were two junk cars in there that I didn't even know about until I hit them with a weed wacker."

The woods now feature a variety of trees, ferns, winding trails and a creek house built with recycled wood, where the couple often stops for a glass of cider. Most importantly, though, it now provides a healthy environment for the salmon in Silver Creek, which cuts through the wooded paradise.

"It's gratifying to see it look like something," Dave says, "like a forest instead of a garden or a nursery."