Week 6 MTSE Individual Blog

 

Coming back from Hawaii, I was very excited to see how the park was holding up and what progress has been made. I was happy to see so many annual plants flourishing and producing fruit! This week, I jumped back into a lot of hands-on work to help speed up the process of the park maintenance. 

At The Park

We had a few days that were fairly labor-intensive at the park. Wednesday, I was pulling a lot of weeds taking over our carrot bed, annual bed, and began to tug away at the snakeroot in the hugelkultur mound. There is a lot of overgrowth of snakeroot within the mound so it will be a few days until it is all cleared and composted. In the annual bed, I weeded around our wild arugula, rosemary, and strawberries which are all doing incredibly well (despite it not being strawberry season now). I hope that we will have more heavy rains to let this park explode with food. 

 

I also began to research how to make a permaculture-friendly pathway for the park. Currently, we have no signage or pronounced entry point for the community to actually identify the land is actually a park. I will be consulting with our faculty mentors about the best resources and ways to establish an aesthetically pleasing entrance. 

 

Community Engagement

This week, we began tabling at the Bethlehem Farmers’ Market! Isabelle and I set up at the market and handed out freshly picked produce (wild arugula, basil, mint, sage, fennel, and raspberries). We had several people interested in our project and about permaculture philosophy. With little turn out at the overall market, we will be planning how to attract more people to our project, whether it be handing out pamphlets around the market or bringing new crops for people to take and enjoy. It was satisfying to hear good feedback from people who tasted our crops, particularly our very pungent arugula. We hope that this will draw the community to the park to enjoy and harvest their own goodies once we make the landscape much more community-friendly. 

 

Website 

Last week while away, I helped us get in contact with Ohana Digital, who will be helping us navigate our website issues. We first received a hefty list of information about our popular keywords, SEO, clicks, etc. With this data, we will work on our content to rank high on searches surrounding permaculture and gardening as a whole. 

 

I also began to work on the content, structuring a new layout for easier readability for the user. I also ran through and removed any errors, repeats, grammar issues so we can maintain and enhance upon our professionalism. 

 

This week, I began to look up and study crash courses about our plug-in, All In One SEO. This will help us to navigate WordPress easier and learn how to quickly fix any issues.