Autumn Has Arrived - by Renee Ackerman, Garden Intern 2015

​These past two weeks here at Songaia have been filled with deep blue autumn skies and golden sunshine! We have officially finished the roof structure over the cob oven! Hooray! The polycarbonate panels are in place and hopefully the oven will remain dry :).

Brent took Steven and I out to visit the bees where we discovered that one of the colonies had abandoned their hive. We decided to harvest the combs that were left behind and melted them down in order to extract the beeswax. We hope to use it to make candles or wax some thread!

Lots of squash, pumpkins, beets and other autumn goodies will be coming in which really makes it feel like autumn is officially here!

We have put a few winter beds to rest and planted cover crops over top to keep the soil intact and fertile over the winter months.

Patricia, Steven, Laura and I successfully removed an unproductive root stalk of a plum tree in Life Song Commons and pruned the surrounding trees to better promote the growth for the plum trees in the area. Which means we added a bunch more braches to the Hugelkultur beds!
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We harvested tons of concord grapes from Life Song Commons, some of which I used to make my grandma’s famous grape pie, which turned out pretty good.