Access Granted! Now what?

Alright! We have been officially given the thumbs up for this project. With some gracious poking and prodding for me to actually have a clear focus complements of my professor Denise Mitten, Ph.D, there is now solid direction to this project. In borrowing a couple of concepts from another course I am taking, Sustainability Theory and Practice in Education, the idea of Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) came into light during one of the papers. TEK is the knowledge often used by indigenous peoples to pay attention to the land to best work with it. This could be understanding seasonal changes to water flows to best maximize crop yield or hunting game. I started thinking about how the Hohokam tribe used TEK to survive for a millennium in the valley of the sun, as place that I initially thought humans should not exist. Turns out they did fine for a thousand years before abruptly disappearing.

Seeing as I have already written the formal research proposal, I'll spare you and myself from another paraphrasing, so here is the link to it that can be found on my school site.

Now that I have the go ahead...what the heck do I do? Before I just started digging up dirt and bought the cheapest seeds at the local hardware store, but now there is a point to all this. This makes me wonder about how most lay persons start when they want to start a garden, which is one of the big reasons why I proposed this project. My being from the East Coast in a water rich environment, those underlying ideas of how to garden there are still the foundation of how I first think to garden here in the desert, a completely different and arid environment. I can't help but imagine that is how many of the gardens in the desert start, and either become very resource intensive processes or the garden keepers just give up because their prior garden knowledge isn't able to sustain a garden in the desert.

You know, sometimes I forget that I teach research methods to high schoolers, and that the very next step is one I assess regularly. I should probably follow that lead. Sounds like a up coming post to me.