Lafayette Community Edible Garden launches 2026 season in Park Point

A vacant hockey rink on Park Point has become one of Duluth’s smallest but most practical food resources: about 40 plant beds, 50 members and a harvest that sends tomatoes not just home with gardeners but also to Chum and other food shelves when there is extra. The Lafayette Community Edible Garden opened its 2026 season on April 25, giving a seasonal boost to a neighborhood project that does more than fill a few plates. It helps offset grocery bills, supports shared meals and keeps fresh produce within reach on the lakefront.

The garden began in 2009, after Coral McDonnell and Ellie Alspach looked at the empty rink and saw a better use for the space. What followed was not a decorative pocket park but a working community plot that has continued to adapt as materials aged and volunteers rebuilt what they could. The original beds were built from old hockey boards, then later replaced with corrugated metal pieces donated through a rowing club construction project. That kind of repurposing has become part of the garden’s identity: practical, local and frugal.

The garden grows greens, squash, beans, peas, tomatoes, cucumbers and potatoes, a spread that matters in a season when every trip to the grocery store carries more weight for household budgets. Some produce goes home with members. Some goes to the next community potluck. Some is set aside for donation, most notably extra tomatoes, which are delivered to Chum or another food shelf. For Park Point, that makes the garden more than a hobby space. It functions as a modest food-access cushion, especially valuable in a neighborhood with limited public gathering places on the lakefront.

McDonnell said she can look out her kitchen window and see the garden in use, a reminder that the project is woven into daily life rather than tucked away as an occasional volunteer effort. That neighborhood presence shows up on the calendar, too. Park Point Community Club newsletters have listed recurring Lafayette Community Edible Garden potlucks in May and June in multiple years, including 2024, 2025 and 2025’s October listing, evidence that the garden has an established rhythm, not a one-time kickoff. The club also says its summer youth program includes gardening at the PP Edible Garden, extending the project to children who begin participating in early June.

The garden sits in Lafayette Park, which the City of Duluth says was platted in 1856. Radisson Elementary School occupied the site from 1905 to 1919, and the building later became the Lafayette Community Center, now home to the Park Point Community Club. On Park Point, a place shaped by the lake and by long stretches of modest neighborhood infrastructure, the garden has turned a once-unused corner into food, fellowship and a small but real local buffer against expensive groceries.