FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 13, 2015
Here are some more or less “after” pictures to compare with photos further down on this page.
Hanging out on the front porches.
Scilla’s and Paul’s front yard. White doors and porch rails have since been painted, and we have new rain collectors now, from Project 15206.
The vegetable garden.
The herb garden.
The back yards.
There have been other important transformations, as well. Emily and Sten brought Jules into the world; he will be 3 soon. Mo and Mike got married. Robin and Josh bought a row house, as did Julianne, who is now in the process of renovating. Monica, Kurt and Cathy, and Chris bought the row houses on North Beatty Street, and have all moved into their new homes. There will soon be two rental units available there; Monica hopes that hers will be ready March 1.
East Liberty Development did some rehab on the Borland Street row houses, and we have new neighbors on that street.
Our new tool shed is built, and we’re hoping to get the building inspector to sign off on it soon.
We filled in the rain gardens behind the Black Street row houses with logs and started hugelkultur gardening. I had a bumper crop of elderberries from the bush in my back yard and made several batches of elderberry syrup, which is a natural therapy for colds and flu. There was enough for me to experiment on gift a jar to almost everyone in the community, and some people felt that it was helpful when they were starting to get sick.
Some things stay the same. We’re planning the garden for the coming growing season. Just today I moved the seedling shelf and grow lights from the basement to my sunny, south-facing bedroom windows. Our neighbor, Addy, is preparing to set up two beehives in the native food forest. We’ve been studying about the care of fruit trees, and built an orchard compost pile (high-carbon; no turning). Mike will soon be coordinating the building of our new garden compost bins.
We’re getting ready to offer Art and the Garden for the neighborhood children, who do art projects and plant their own vegetable bed. And we’re looking forward to welcoming back the students from Friendship Academy next month.
Maria and I have been keeping up with the Larimer Cohousing Group (the next neighborhood east of us), as they organize themselves. They’ve identified several potential sites for their new-construction community, and we are helping them make the case for cohousing as a community development tool.
I’ll be posting events of interest on the Events tab, so check in regularly to see what’s happening.
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MONDAY, FEBRUARY 20, 2012
Borland Green is an intentional community of people who enjoy spending time together and have a similar vision. Some of the people are fixing up old, run down homes and becoming neighbors in East Liberty, but other community members live some distance away. Our primary shared interests are community building and environmental stewardship. We want to contribute to the quality of life in East Liberty by sharing food and expertise, by helping neighbors and being advocates for the larger community .
At this time, the Borland Green members who reside in East Liberty own or rent seven units in a row house on the 5800 block of Black Street. The rental units are owned by East Liberty Development (1); ELDI staff members are working with the renters to help them be able to buy their homes. ELDI also owns seven other row house units on the same block, two on North Beatty Street and five on Borland Street, that they will be renting or selling to other people interested in being part of the Borland Green community. (2)
In addition to homeowners’ private money going into renovating the row houses, each house received an Elm Street Façade Improvement grant from the State, through the URA, that allowed the front of the building to be cleaned and the porches to be repaired. (3)
Resident and non-resident community members
- share occasional meals,
- help those who have purchased and are renovatingBlack Streetrow houses,
- meet to map out strategies for letting others know of opportunities to live on the block or become part of Borland Green while living elsewhere in and around the City
- discuss issues like safety and ways to improve the neighborhood by enhancing economic and racial diversity without displacing long-time residents who are good neighbors
- celebrate.
We take advantage of opportunities to get to know our neighbors so that we can integrate our close-knit intentional community into the existing social fabric.
The Borland Garden Cooperative is a community group that manages and tends the garden that Borland Green members share. The garden is approximately 1/3 of an acre of land at the corner of Black and North Beatty Streets that has transitioned from housing to empty lots to a GTECH (4) demonstration garden to an urban garden that will be maintained under the auspices of the Cooperative.
East Liberty Development currently owns the land, and has licensed the use of it to the Cooperative for three years, at which time the Cooperative will purchase the land. Four households are putting money into a reserve fund for the Cooperative to use to buy the lots that make up the garden. We hope that other donors will contribute funds to help make this purchase possible.
GTECH licensed the land from ELDI for three years before the Cooperative took over stewardship of the garden. They invested energy and funds in clearing debris and rebuilding the soil so that we were able to plant some vegetables in the summer of 2011, our first year as caretakers of the garden.
The Cooperative worked with ELDI to secure a grant from the Community Design Center of Pittsburgh (5) to hire Pashek Associates, Landscape Architects (6), to draw up a long-range plan for the garden. The sketches you will see throughout this document are the work of Sara Thompson, the designer from Pashek who worked with us to produce a cohesive vision from our fragmented dreams for this space. Community members and non-community people – although you become a community member when you participate in just about any way – who want to see this vision realized will need to contribute time and energy, money, and materials to make it happen.
Pittsburgh Permaculture (7) secured a Spring Grant from the Sprout Fund (8) in 2011 to design and install a food forest in the garden and, along with GTECH, organized groups of volunteers to sheet mulch the extensive areas where fruit and nut trees and berry bushes would be planted. Some of those plants went into the garden in the Fall of 2011; the remainder will be installed in the Spring of 2012.
ELDI, which had been awarded a SWIM grant from the Heinz Endowments (9) for storm water mitigation demonstration projects, used some of that money to design and install two rain gardens – one in Borland Garden and one behind the Black Street row houses – and to purchase a 1500-gallon cistern to store rain water harvested from the roofs of the houses. This allows us to keep storm water on the site, rather than sending it into the sewer system, and to water the garden with ”free” rain that has no chemicals added to it, rather than paying for potable water.
Not everyone in the Borland Green community is passionate about gardening, but most everyone enjoys sharing meals made from ingredients we have grown ourselves. At the end of the 2011 growing season, we made the first of what we hope will be many fresh food contributions to the East End Cooperative Ministry (EECM) (10) Food Pantry. We also hope to be able to preserve some produce from each of our future harvests, and share the preparation and consumption of community meals with family, friends and neighbors for many years to come.
TreeVitalize (11) awarded Borland Green 13 street trees – a mix of dogwood and serviceberry – in the Fall of 2011. Members planted seven in the front yards of the Black Street row houses and six around the two street edges of Borland Garden, with the help of Tree Pittsburgh (12) and numerous volunteers.
Also in the Fall of 2011, Travis Eckman built a chimney swift tower as an Eagle Scout project (13), which we hope will become home to a colony of Chimney Swifts this spring. The birds are beneficial as they feed on mosquitoes and other insects. And we received a grant for building a tool shed from Eaton Corporation (14).
see the “Notes” tab for the numbered references in the text above …
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MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 26, 2011
The weather continues to be quite nice, and we have much to accomplish in the garden at the corner of Black and North Beatty Streets. Three of us went to the Mother Earth News Fair at Seven Springs last weekend, and learned a lot about chickens, bees, cover crops, extending the growing season, starting to plan next year’s garden NOW, and much more.
We’re meeting tomorrow with the designer of a rain garden to be installed behind three of our houses to catch the overflow from rain barrels. Funding for this storm water management demonstration project is from the Heinz Endowments – Summer Youth Philanthropy Program.
East Liberty’s application to Tree Vitalize for street trees to be planted on Beatty Street was approved. We’ll be getting more details about how many trees and where they will go next Tuesday.
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THURSDAY, JULY 7, 2011
The Borland Green Community will soon have room for expansion! East Liberty Development is purchasing row houses on the West side of the block (5) and the East side of the block (2) in July, and can prepare them for rental or sale. We don’t have a lot of details yet – like size (under 1000 sq ft?) or price – but if you have considered being part of an intentional community, and renovating an existing structure appeals to you, the sooner you make up your mind to inquire, the more likely you can keep your costs for purchase and renovation relatively low and get the end result you want for your private home, should you decide to buy. East Liberty Development has agreed to work with the Borland Green Community to match households that want to join the community with opportunities to buy or rent homes on the Borland Green block.
The social part of joining an intentional community is worth considering carefully. Our community life involves sharing meals, meetings to address the ongoing needs of the community, helping each other renovate our homes and tame our overgrown yards, and environmental stewardship through energy conservation and working together on a shared urban garden through the Borland Garden Cooperative. Borland Garden serves as a common place to be shared by Borland Green Community members, family, friends and neighbors.
Geographically, the center of Borland Green lies on the city block bounded by Borland Street, Black Street, North Beatty Street, and East Liberty Boulevard. As an intentional Community, however, Borland Green is defined less by fixed geographic boundaries than by the relationships forged among Community members. Therefore, it is hoped that residents in the surrounding neighborhood will be drawn to the sense of community represented by Borland Green. Given the amorphous geographical boundaries of Borland Green, Borland Garden provides a formal structure and physical location through which individuals can be involved in this intentional community. (You don’t have to live here to be part of the Community, but it saves a lot of travel.)
Borland Garden is intended as a space for expressions of creativity, spirituality, hospitality, and community through a commitment to environmental stewardship. Members of the Borland Garden Cooperative aspire to create a space that:
- Promotes a sense of community and neighborhood through shared work, learning, and fun;
- Provides a sustainable source of food for Cooperative members and a surplus for donation to others;
- Serves as a model of urban environmental stewardship and a site for education, with a special emphasis on issues of sustainability;
- Offers an aesthetically pleasing space for rest, relaxation, creative exploration, recreation, and entertainment, and
- Promotes biodiversity.
The Borland Green Community and the Borland Garden Cooperative aim to:
1. nurture respect for and care of the environment;
2. nurture the physical, mental, social, and spiritual well-being of individuals;
3. nurture a safe and supportive community and neighborhood;
4. share our resources — like talents, energy, tools, transportation
All of the Garden Cooperative Shareholders collectively constitute the Governing Board of the Cooperative. Decision-making of the Governing Board is by consensus.
If this sounds like the kind of community you want to be part of, contact Pat Buddemeyer at buddem@att.net or Maria Piantanida at maria.piantanida@verizon.net.
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TUESDAY, MAY 31, 2011
Emily and Sten have begun demolition on the inside of their unit. The east wall is down to the studs in preparation for putting up a proper fire wall.
The scaffolding has been erected in preparation for putting on the new roof. We chose a material that will allow us to safely harvest the rainwater and use it on the garden.
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TUESDAY, APRIL 26, 2011
We’ve been working hard, both inside and outside, for the last month. Ken and Bob, Mary, and I have purchased our three units. Emily and Sten, and Mo have sales agreements on their two. Not much time for writing these days.
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MONDAY, FEBRUARY 21, 2011
We all have Spring fever now, so the garden is uppermost in our thoughts and plans (see the Borland Garden page). A grant to East Liberty Development is paying for a landscape architect to help us plan an urban oasis that will be our yard and a neighborhood asset. There are so many things we want to include, and the space is so large that it’s a little bit daunting to think about all the work it will take to tame it.
We are scheduled to close on our row houses on March 7th, and we’re all so anxious for work on those to get started … the roof, the facade, and everything in the interiors. It’s our intention to do as much of the work ourselves as possible, with the help of family, friends, neighbors and, of course, each other. Ken and Mary have done this kind of work before, so we’ll rely on them for guidance. We’re expecting this to result in a huge savings over the cost of paying contractors for the unskilled labor aspects of the job. Ken will even be able to do much of the skilled work on his unit.
We’re also planning to apply for a matching facade improvement grant from the State. If we put in up to $5000, the grant will match that amount. We want to use those funds to clean the brick on the front of the building and rebuild the porches, which have support posts going into the ground rather than being properly footed. Then new doors, a little trim, a little paint and, voila, curb appeal.
Borland Green 