Blue Ridge Timberwrights Gives Back to the Community

The YMCA Community Gardens: The mission for the Gardens is to provide a place for community members to grow local foods, create a gardening community, and foster a sense of fellowship while maintaining green space in the community and highlighting best practices in gardening.

The Hale-YMCA Gardens (“The Gardens”) are named in honor of Howard and Berneda Hale, parents of Arlene Hale Lambert. The Gardens are being developed with a vision of keeping the property as an asset to the neighborhood and in the general community's use through organic gardening, exploration of environmental gardening - based community projects, and environmental education.

The vision of the Hale-YMCA Community Gardens is to provide a community space for people to learn more about ways to cultivate food with respect to the natural environment. The 15-acre site will be a living demonstration of various methods of sustainable cultivation that will support and catalyze self-reliance as well as community responsibility. In partnership with the new Virginia Tech Civic Agriculture Minor, students and residents will have the opportunity to contribute the exchange of knowledge, time, labor, or money to this project. The gardens will provide not only a demonstration of how this can be done, but through the new YMCA's Garden Education Program show citizens ways to establish, care and maintain food sources in their backyard and community spaces.

In 2009, the Roper Solar Greenhouse opened at the site in an effort to make year-round local food production possible. The Timber Frame Pavilion, as described below, will be named the Alfred Payne Educational Building. The Rev. Alfred Payne was a longtime member of the Rotary, as well as the director of religious affairs at Virginia Tech and the YMCA at Virginia Tech.

The Project: The YMCA at Virginia Tech had a dream of conducting training sessions and classes under cover at their Community Gardens location in Blacksburg, Virginia. Their plan was to construct a pole barn structure. They came to us and asked for guidance, resulting in a plan for a Timber Frame Pavilion.

As often happens, we became engaged with this project with the goal of supporting our local community - and it moved forward quickly. The design team went to work and created an enhanced version of the original structure proposed for the project. The timber was reclaimed from our inventory of salvage and other white oak timbers. The timbers were cut, planed, sanded and oiled. Now it was time to take the pavilion to site and make the YMCA's dream a reality. The Rotary Club of Blacksburg provided additional materials and assisted with raising the structure on site.

Enjoy the slideshow below as Sandy Bennett, BRTW Owner and Mike Ramey, BRTW Operations Manager participate in and direct the raising of the YMCA at Virginia Tech Community Gardens Timber Frame Pavilion.