A Minnesota Church Turned Its Mowed Lawn Into 78 Garden Plots for Families, Many of Them Refugees

Behind Advent Lutheran Church in Maple Grove, Minnesota, the growing season is over. When a CCX Media crew visited in late October, the soil was mostly bare and church leaders were getting ready for fall tilling. But the leftovers told the story of a busy summer: the remains of peppers, cabbage and jicama, spread across 78 separate garden plots.

“It’s just gardens, after gardens, after gardens,” volunteer coordinator Anne Strootman told CCX News, based in nearby Brooklyn Park, in a story published Oct. 29.

The church calls them the Giving Gardens. They started with one volunteer and a single plot in 2007. Today the plots are worked by individual gardeners, many of them refugee families, who grow food for their own tables on land the church used to mow. There is a long waiting list to get in.

From one plot to 78

According to CCX, church member Sue Barry-Hagen started the Giving Gardens on Advent’s property in 2007. At first it was a smaller plot kept by volunteers, and the harvest went to CROSS Services, a food shelf in nearby Rogers that serves Maple Grove, Osseo, Champlin, Dayton, Rogers, Corcoran, Albertville and St. Michael.

A few years later, the church made a change. Instead of only growing food to give away, it opened the land so people could tend plots of their own.

“It was literally just lawn that was needing to be maintained and mowed,” Strootman said. “We really felt there was a need to offer that space up for people to grow vegetables and produce that they could use to feed their families.”

Betsy Cardinal, Advent’s special projects coordinator, described the same arc to KSTP 5 Eyewitness News in the Twin Cities: one volunteer in 2007 looking for a way to use extra church land to help the community and address food insecurity, and a program that grew from one plot to 78.

Gardeners pay $20 a plot, CCX reported. The church covers the rest of the cost, and volunteers help with irrigation and upkeep.

A family of 10, and a long wait

One of this year’s gardeners is Mackenzie Vang of Blaine. She told KSTP that 2026 was her first year off the waiting list. Vang came to the United States from Laos in 1981 and has been a member of Advent for many years. She said she uses what she grows to help feed her family of 10.

“I really like it, I really appreciate it too for the church to have hearts and think about the community and make nature beautiful,” Vang said.

Strootman said many of the gardeners come from cultures where farming and growing food are central to daily life, and the plots let them keep that up in a new country.

“Being able to give that opportunity for people who may be in their traditional culture where agriculture is really important for them, to be able to do that here, is really fulfilling as well,” she told CCX.

Senior Pastor Elizabeth Felt pointed to something gardeners will understand right away: the plots let families grow what they actually want to eat, including foods that are hard to find at a grocery store.

“One of the things I observe in people gardening is they’re able to grow the food they most want to eat,” Felt said. “It empowers them.”

A congregation’s own garden story

The connection runs deeper than shared land. On its website, Advent tells the story of a longtime member named Elfriede, who was part of the church’s first giving garden, one that grew flowers to share with residents at Steeple Point. After her husband of 54 years, Carl, died, she found comfort in the congregation and in tending the plants in the church’s columbarium, the resting place of Carl and others.

When she finishes there, the church writes, she often walks over to the plots worked by refugee families. She admired how hard they worked and how they made use of every bit of space, even with handmade tools. It all felt familiar. Elfriede spent much of her childhood in a refugee camp in Lübeck, Germany, where her family grew much of its food in a small garden behind their one-room home, Barracks 13, Room 4. In that tiny home, the church’s story says, her mother taught her that God was always walking beside them.

“I love those people!” Elfriede told the church. “They are so nice, so giving and they work so hard.”

It is a small story about how a garden can connect people across generations and continents. A woman who once depended on a garden behind a barracks now walks past rows of peppers and cabbage grown by families starting over in Minnesota.

One more way to help hungry neighbors

The Giving Gardens are not Advent’s only response to hunger. CCX reported that the church also works with CROSS Services and Loaves and Fishes. Through a giving effort the church calls its Gift of Love, Advent has supported CROSS and other local groups with money and with food and clothing drives, according to the church’s website. It also partners with Osseo Senior High to pack weekend backpacks of food and hygiene items for students.

The need is real. CROSS Services says on its website that client visits keep rising and cites a Second Harvest Heartland study finding that one in five Minnesota households struggle to afford enough food. CCX’s report opened by noting that food shelf visits rise every year.

“We felt this was just another way that we can help the community with food insecurity,” Strootman said.

Felt said the church is trying to give in several ways at once. “We’re doing everything we can to give both more money, more food to these places, but to also provide volunteer energy,” she told CCX.

Who is our neighbor?

For Felt, the gardens are a plain expression of what the congregation believes. She framed it with the question a lawyer once asked Jesus before the parable of the Good Samaritan.

“We want to be a good neighbor. That is one of the ways we are living out our faith, is: ‘Who is our neighbor?’ and our neighbors come from all corners of the globe now,” she said. “We want to be welcoming and loving, and meet them where they’re at.”

The church is not standing still. CCX reported that Advent plans to open a farmers market next year so its gardeners can sell some of their extra produce, which could turn a family’s surplus zucchini or peppers into a little extra income.

Both Felt and Cardinal said they hope other congregations take the idea and run with it. Cardinal told KSTP that Advent may be reaching capacity, but its example could still spread. “We may inspire another church or another organization or community group to say hey, we can try this sort of a program,” she said.

What it could look like here

Many churches, here in the East Valley included, have the same thing Advent started with: a stretch of grass that someone has to mow. The difference in the low desert is the calendar. Minnesota gardeners are putting their plots to bed for winter, while Arizona gardeners are in the middle of the best planting season of the year. Lettuce, kale, carrots, beets, cabbage and other cool-season crops go in during the fall here, and a church plot started now could be producing by late winter.

Advent’s model is simple enough to copy on a small scale. Offer plots for a modest fee, find a few volunteers who understand irrigation, keep a waiting list, and let families decide what to grow. In a desert, drip lines and mulch matter more than they do in Minnesota, and the University of Arizona Cooperative Extension and local Master Gardener volunteers can help with planting dates and water planning.

Learning more

Advent Lutheran Church is at 9475 Jefferson Highway in Maple Grove, Minnesota. Its website, adventlutheran.com, includes information about its outreach work. CROSS Services, at 12915 Weinand Circle in Rogers, accepts donations and volunteers and can be reached at 763-425-1050 or crossservices.org.

The Giving Gardens are quiet now, tilled under until spring. When the ground thaws, 78 families will be back with seeds, hoes and handmade tools, and the waiting list will still be there. A church lawn that once needed mowing will be feeding people again.