This week at Mountaintop was particularly productive in terms of reevaluating our goals for the Permaculture Park and planning for community engagement.
In terms of community engagement, what was notable to me this week was our meeting with The Seed Farm. On Wednesday afternoon, we took a trip to The Seed Farm in Emmaus, accompanied by another interested student who occasionally works at the park. The Seed Farm is an incubator farm that gives beginner farmers an opportunity to test out a business model for a farm through leasing land and having access to all types of farm equipment. The Seed Farm helps farmers establish themselves so that they can then transition to having their own farm. Our visit to the seed farm was helpful in a variety of ways, mainly because Katy, the person we met with, was able to give us a variety of contacts and resources for other places we could visit to learn more about urban agriculture and farming. Katy also encouraged us to think about what the main goals of the Permaculture Park were, and how we could engage the Southside Bethlehem community. She suggested planting mainly fruit and flowers, as they provide aesthetic appeal and are things that people can pick themselves, meaning they will spend time in the park.
After meeting with The Seed Farm, who encouraged us to define the main goal of the permaculture park and what to focus on, we re-defined some of our goals and used the surrounding whiteboards in our cubicle to outline what was most important to us. We determined that park accessibility, park yields, and our case study were most important to us. We further broke this down by detailing our park action items and maintenance plan, our plans for community engagement and our partners, and our plans for what topics we want to cover in our case study. This will help inform our decisions regarding what to prioritize and how to use our space in the future.
However, this week, we did also run into a potentially major issue in terms of thinking about the longevity of our project. We received a disheartening email from Risk Management while inquiring about community engagement at the park. This email included a discouraging “side note” that our park may “be developed for other use” in the future. This was the first that we have heard of this, which came as a shock to our team. We immediately emailed our advisors about this, and we are waiting to hear back about how we should proceed. We firmly believe that this land is important to Lehigh University and the Southside Bethlehem community and that the university should respect student projects. This made us question how much we should be investing into the physical land of the park now that we have heard it may be taken away from us, and while we have a variety of other things we can work on beyond our land such as educational programming and consulting, we are willing to fight to protect the land we do have and the benefits it can bring to our community.
As for park maintenance, we also continued our work modifying the petal beds, and did general routine maintenance, which included transplanting mint in our herb spiral and adding more corn and squash to our annual bed. While this was productive and will increase the yields of our park, it becomes difficult to think about the impact of these procedures with the information we’ve heard from risk management and the uncertainty of our land.
Other forms of community engagement this week include preparing materials for the Bethlehem Farmers’ Market and attending our first Southside Task Force meeting. There weren’t many people at the Southside Task Force meeting because of the upcoming holiday, but it was interesting to attend another meeting focused on the Southside Bethlehem community. There was a very insightful discussion as well between Professor Kate Jackson and Officer Rodriguez regarding trash and how people have called the police over trash which was interesting to hear.
Overall, this was a productive week for the permaculture park, but a week that reminded us of the local political landscapes we conduct our work in. We accomplished a lot, but there is a lot of work to complete ahead, especially in terms of maintaining the longevity of our park.