A vacation at Nelson's Resort comes with an extra found only rarely at a resort. For many guests, perhaps living in an apartment, condo, or simply a home with insufficient space, the opportunity just doesn't exist to maintain their own vegetable garden so the therapeutic respite that comes from standing in the center of the Gardens at Nelson's is worth the trip to Nelson's Resort. The following is a copy of an article written for Country Gardens Magazine by Margaret A. Haapoja.
Vegetables, herbs, and flowers grow in well-ordered profusion in a Minnesota garden on the edge of the wilderness. Their nurturing goodness satisfies the senses of all who visit.
The growing season is short and the fishing tales are tall up in northern Minnesota, where Nelson's Resort and its gardens flourish at the edge of Crane Lake and 5 million acres of wilderness. Built by John and Millie Nelson during the Depression, today Nelson's is nationally renowned as a family fishing resort. But guests are treated to more than nature's beauty and the promise of a good catch; they're also lured by wholesome meals prepared with produce from the lodge's garden and served in a rustic dining room warmed by firelight and the glow of antique copper. The Thursday smorgasbord, open to the public, draws an average of 200 diners who travel for miles by car, boat, and airplane to share the evening's repast.
In Nelson's garden--nurtured by Jacque Eggen, a third- generation Nelson--neat rows of vegetables march in military precision. Curly ornamental kale, ruffled leaves of savoy cabbage, butterhead lettuce, and fronds of asparagus are edged with parsley and orange marigolds.
Enveloped by endless timber and encircled by charming log cabins, the resort's bountiful garden is nearly as big an attraction as the fish. When guests aren't on the water, they often can be found wandering the pristine pathways.
Jacque, who inherited a green thumb and a passion for gardening from her grandmother, adopted the garden when Millie Nelson died in 1977. "I started doing it because somebody had to," she says. "But once I got into it, I really found that I enjoyed it."
Although her responsibility was new, involvement with the garden was not. "I always was the tomboy type," she admits. "I had pet snakes and toads, and even when I was six or seven, I used to help my grandma in the garden."
Like the garden, Jacque's enthusiasm has grown. She now starts all her own plants--about 450 every March--and raises everything from Afro parsley to perennials such as peonies. For the past two years she has done trial plantings of new varieties for Shepherd's Garden Seeds.
Because she wears so many hats--handling everything from hiring staff and scheduling reservations to buying for and managing the trading post-Jacque employs a gardener, to help implement plans and keep the garden productive. (Jacque's husband, Butch, is a fishing guide.)
With nearly 70 hungry guests to satisfy nightly, Jacque faces a unique gardening challenge. She can't grow corn, squash, or potatoes because these crops gobble up too much space. Instead, she concentrates on other vegetables, many of which can be planted successively for multiple harvests: sugar snap peas, bush beans, baby carrots, lettuce, tomatoes, green peppers, cabbage, and cucumbers.
Over the years Jacque has learned several tricks of the gardening trade. She creates an elaborate garden plan each year and makes two copies, one in pencil, the other in three color ink for the gardener to follow. "If you were to look at my plans from year to year," she says, "you'd see that I do try to rotate everything, but there's no way possible in this size of plot that I can."
To replenish the soil, Jacque tills leaves and compost into the garden in the fall along with 150 pounds of bonemeal. Since they use wood chips to mulch the garden, Jacque tests the soil for nitrogen and pH every spring, adding commercial fertilizer when necessary.
Although Jacque always looks for new ideas, she finds that some of her grandmother's gardening techniques are timeless. Practicality was especially important in the resort's early days, and Grandma Millie's ideas came in handy. For instance, Jacque implemented her idea for using hazel brush salvaged from the surrounding woods as a trellis for peas.
"It's imperative that you go cut the brush when the wood ticks are the worst," Jacque jokes, explaining that the "junk" brush must be collected in late April or early May before the leaves bud out. Because Jacque does three plantings of peas each season, she needs 1,500 branches.
Jacque also credits the memory of gathering cucumbers for her grandmother as the inspiration for designing cedar racks on which to grow them. Instead of playing hide and seek with the elusive vegetables, she easily harvests cucumbers suspended in midair. "When we put them up people were just amazed," she recalls. "Now I see them in garden catalogs, and people ask me if I patented them!"
Common sense has served Jacque well in dealing with the garden. She has learned such techniques as tying up bush beans through simple trial and error.
"You have to pick beans every two days," she says. "By the time you walk through, they're falling down and lying on the ground where they get mildew and the stems start to rot." Three or four heavy stakes laced with string support the beans so that air and sun can dry them.
To protect onion sets and cole crops from such insistent intruders as root maggots and cabbage worms, Jacque uses Reemay, a synthetic floating row cover. She also drapes the material over the cucumber racks in early spring to protect tender seedlings.
"I try to spend as little money as I can on the garden," she says of the plot her grandfather jokingly called the NP or nonprofit garden, because it doesn't bring in direct income. "But it is a very important part of the resort."
In addition to Afro parsley edging each plot, Jacque grows an herb garden in a raised bed. She picks the herbs at the end of the season, washes them well, ties them with strings, and hangs them to dry in the loft of the trading post. "I usually dry a gallon jar of parsley, basil, and sage and enough of the others for myself and the relatives," she says.
Such self-sufficiency has sustained Nelson women for nearly 60 years. It once helped tame a bit of wilderness-- and now enables a granddaughter to embrace her heritage.
These days, as the sun turns the lake to liquid gold, bells announce the evening meal. Guests drawn by the warm glow of the dining hall often pause on garden pathways to admire Jacque's handiwork. It's a sight that would make Grandma Millie proud.
