We made solid progress at the park this week. We first kicked off week 8 meeting with Jennifer Mack from the Penn State Extension. She provided us with some great input on how to carry the park forward aesthetically and productively. From her input, I began to carve out the structure for the pathway around the herb spiral. Starting here will be way easier and look better than in the middle of the grass. By the end of next week, weather permitting, the pathway around the herb spiral should be completed. 

 

Beyond the pathway, I carried through a lot of the general maintenance tasks that needed to be done. I worked a lot in the annual beds, putting more seeds down (corn), thinning out our new cucumber plants, and weeding A LOT. I also worked on pruning the tomatoes so there will be better growth and more of the plant’s energy will be focused on the fruit that is already growing. I also pulled a lot of snakeroot out of the herb spiral, sifted out the rest of the compost, and got fresh compost in the orchard, by the luffas, and scattered elsewhere. 

 

Last week it was extremely hot, making it difficult to stay outdoors past 11am. With that, the team worked a lot more virtually. I was able to dedicate more time figuring out how to navigate the website and the downloaded theme. I spoke with a web analyst and we tried to fix the site together, but it would keep crashing on us and nothing would upload correctly. He said that through all his years of work, this is by far the most difficult website he has ever worked on. This is extremely frustrating since we have a lot of material in dire need of updates and one of our major goals is to expand ourselves virtually so people can use us as an educational tool. Even when taking every correct step, there is a wall of failures. With the goal in mind, I will keep working on the website beyond mountaintop. 

 

Lastly, I read through more literature surrounding the policy of parks and green spaces in Bethlehem and began to upload useful information for future teams to use. From our Rodale trip during week 7, we received a pamphlet discussing the benefits of different plants and their healing uses. Several of the plants are already located at our park, but many others can and will be planted in our petal beds that we are working on redesigning. This content will be tremendously informative for the future as well as for the fall 2023 urban permaculture class.