Head Gardener at Minam River Lodge in Joseph, Oregon

Head Gardener at Minam River Lodge in Joseph, Oregon

The Minam River Lodge is an intimate, off-grid resort located deep in Oregon's treasured Eagle Cap Wilderness on a historic property that overlooks the wild and scenic Minam River. Guests enjoy refined wilderness cuisine featuring the bounty of our own farm and greenhouse,and local farms and ranches. Lovingly hand-built log cabins and a beautiful modern Lodge provide accommodations for 36 people.

A live-in staff provides a luxurious level of service with a cozy family feel. The Lodge has been named by various publications as a premiere backcountry lodge. We pride ourselves on providing a superb guest experience with personable, authentic, and professional service.

The Lodge Gardener grows a productive wilderness garden to support the Farm to Table cuisine of our wilderness lodge. Our capacity is 36 guests, averaging 30. About 20 staff live on property for the duration of guest season. The impressive greenhouse and beautiful garden serve as a focal point of the property and receive frequent visitors. The space consists of a well-fenced area of about twenty 45-ft rows and a ~40' x 50' greenhouse, at an elevation of around 3,600 ft.

The position is one-part production, one part cut-flowers, and one part guest experience.

This is an amazing opportunity for a disciplined self-starter who wants to combine farming with hospitality and landscaping. The wilderness is a challenging place to grow, with unpredictable weather, all the normal pests, and lack of immediate access to resources. But it's an excellent challenge, a great place to sharpen your skills. Resilience, self-motivation, organization, awareness, kindness, and humility are highly desirable traits for this position.

Market garden:
Your primary role is to provide produce for the lodge restaurant that feeds around thirty guests. Providing produce for the staff of about twenty is also a goal if resources allow. Responsibilities include seeding, growing, harvesting, washing, weighing, packaging, and storing. The deep rich soil and abundant groundwater has allowed for dry-farming the garden the past two years, yielding abundant results and increasing yields year over year.

The previous gardener set up infrastructure and systems to increase yields and reduce drudgery, including bed prep, cultivation tools, deer and gopher fencing, insect netting, frost cloth, low-tunnels, germination mats, greenhouse climate control mechanisms, and a wash/pack tailored for roots/greens. Previous seasons' records on a Google Drive will bring you up to date on harvest weights, recommended varieties, and other notes/support materials.

You'll have one dedicated staff who spends half of their work time in the garden, usually as a harvester helper. Expect to work with this person closely, and to likely train them.

Regular, clear communication with the chefs is essential to the position, which currently includes regular conversations, a weekly Fresh List email, and a daily group text telling them what's been harvested and put in the walk-in.

You'll also maintain the compost— emptying and cleaning buckets of kitchen scraps daily, mixing the compost with sawdust, and turning the compost with a tractor (groundskeeper can assist).

Guest Experience:Giving impromptu guest tours of the garden can be expected throughout the day— greeting them, touring them around the garden, explaining systems, connecting, listening, and thanking them for visiting. These tours can be repetitive, but personable and authentic conversation is appreciated by the guests and an important part of visiting the Lodge. You'll need to be organized enough to receive visitors and pick up where you left off.

Maintaining the garden grounds is another gardener responsibility— mowing, weed whacking, and/or scything the garden lawn; edging beds; plus trimming and cultivating the perennials, shrubs, and trees—many of them native plants— throughout the garden.

Cut-Flowers:
You need to know how to grow and harvest a diversity of cut-flowers throughout the season for regular arrangements. Housekeeping staff does much of the harvesting with occasional…