Garden-in-a-Box fuels Koochiching County’s commitment to feeding their community.

This article first appeared in the Summer 2025 issue of Northern Gardener magazine. Visit our shop to order this or other available back issues.

STORY ANNA MARHEFKE + REBECCA SWEE

Along the northernmost edge of Minnesota, a dilapidated drive-through fast-food joint now serves a new audience: food-insecure residents in Koochiching County. The primary hunger relief organization in that area, Koochiching County Food Access (formerly Falls Hunger Coalition) has been providing free meals to food-insecure community members for nearly four decades.

To grow their efforts, they moved to this new location and joined the Minnesota Horticultural Society’s Garden-in-a-Box program in 2023.

Thanks to donations of plant material, soil, fertilizer and growing tips, lush gardens now surround the building and produce enough food for regular food shelf donations, neighborhood noshing and on-site education, skills building and community participation.

Nestled in the heart of a food desert largely defined by urban blight, this once-neglected lot is now a rich source of beauty, wildlife habitat, community, conversations and taste treats. Passersby are welcome to pluck tomatoes for snacking and hopefully pull a few weeds, too, to help nearby neighbors who tend the garden.

“We call it a ‘learning garden,’” says food shelf executive director Christina Daniel-McKee. And it’s a beautiful example of how reimagining abandoned land can cultivate productive and safe community spaces that foster conversation and sustainability and produce much needed healthy food—Koochiching County Food Access harvested 45 pounds of produce in 2024 alone.

“Garden-in-a-Box is such a great program. We are starting to think more about resource conservation and are looking to harvest rainwater and make other modifications to garden more sustainably.”