Friday morning I ventured inside the beltway to visit another community garden. Braes Interfaith Ministries is a ministry of Protestant, Catholic and Jewish congregations. They’ve been around for more than 25 years and provide clothing, food and financial assistance to over 16,000 people annually in southwest Houston.
The Braes Interfaith Ministries Community Garden is sited on a CenterPoint easement, which makes it particularly interesting to us. I was fortunate to meet with Eloy Montez, the Executive Director. He talked about the garden and shared some advice about working with CenterPoint. Their garden was established over 20 years ago, when Houston Lighting & Power first gave them permission to garden on the easement. They have had to make concessions now that CenterPoint owns the easement, but their donation garden is still providing nutritious food for the poor in their community.
There are a couple of significant differences in their arrangement and ours. (1) CenterPoint is the fee owner of the property where the Braes Interfaith garden is located. In our case, BAUUC is the fee owner of the property, but CenterPoint has easement rights for the transmission lines. (2) The Braes garden is built up very near to the tower structures, but none of the garden elements are directly under the lines. The BAUUC garden maintains a requisite clearance from the tower and guyline structures, but our garden beds are under the lines.
We’ll be talking more about this soon. For now, enjoy the photos…
BAUUC Community Garden 