IF YOU'VE deplored the difficulties of growing food the past couple of chilly summers, consider gardening in a zone 4-5 mountain canyon. That's what they do at Sleeping Lady Resort just outside Leavenworth.

"We have frost through May, and it could hit again as early as the second week in September," says garden manager Eron Drew.

Despite tending a garden among steep peaks along the aptly named Icicle Creek, Drew is determined to eke every vegetable and fruit possible out of the resort's two-acre organic garden. With the help of a 50-by-12-foot greenhouse, the garden provides all of the herbs and an increasing share of the produce served in the resort's restaurant.

The coordination between restaurant and garden is an ongoing dance. Drew meets with executive chef Ken MacDonald every winter to discuss which vegetables and fruit he'd like to serve, and what the garden can supply.

In 1991, Harriet Bullitt of King Broadcasting bought an old camp on 67 acres adjacent to property she'd owned for some time. She hired Jones & Jones Architects and Landscape Architects to help create her dream of an environmentally friendly retreat and conference center. In the years since, meeting rooms, a library, a performance hall and guest rooms have been added. Shady, pine-scented paths are lined with surprising art installations like the silvery explosion of a Chihuly perched on a rock outside the dining hall.

To reach the garden, visitors walk past a larger-than-life-size statue of Elvis and through a clematis-draped arbor. Guestsare encouraged to stroll the garden anytime or join Drew's tour on Saturdays.

When Drew took over the garden three years ago, the soil was badly depleted. Now she's constantly rotating cover crops; this year she under-sowed the eggplants, peppers and tomatillos with vetch, which will be turned over and dug in next spring to enrich the soil.

The growing season is typically short, but this past summer, night temperatures dipped to 37 degrees well into August.

What plants produce in such harsh conditions?

"Bok choy, cabbages, kale and chard," says Drew, who has given up on tomatoes and grows a variety of root vegetables instead.

For garnishes on the restaurant's desserts, she grows edible flowers such as pansies, violets, marigolds, sweet William and calendula. She and her crew harvested 400 pounds of blueberries this year, but lost grapes that weren't mulched yet when the temperature plunged to 15 degrees a year ago.

Even when snow blankets the ground, Drew digs out horseradish and harvests leeks marked with bamboo stakes so she can find them beneath the drifts. By starting crops in the greenhouse and using row covers, she gets two or three crops of carrots and beets each year, and grows arugula, spinach, cilantro and chervil over many months. "We harvest beautiful cilantro here in October," she says. "There's no problem with it bolting." Drew kept spun-polyester row covers on the basil all summer, and by late August was harvesting 13 pungent pounds a week.

Drew, who grew up in Wisconsin, loves to experiment with extending the growing season. The greenhouse is outlined with cold frames. It radiates heat to melt the snow enough that Drew can plant seedlings out by late February to harvest by the end of March. Drew's plans include growing winter potatoes in cedar boxes inside the greenhouse, and covering a fall sowing of peas with greenhouse plastic.

The ever-resourceful Drew is amenable to sharing her best trick. She cuts the bottoms out of compostable paper cups, and wiggles them into the soil around freshly planted seedlings before sheltering the plants with row covers. The cups protect the seedlings from wind and reflect the sun, she explains. The plants "grow three times as fast, so we have a harvest by the end of April."

Valerie Easton is a Seattle freelance writer and author of "The New Low-Maintenance Garden." Check out her blog at www.valeaston.com.