I may earn a commission if you click on links in this post and make a purchase.
Fall shifts gradually, cool mornings arriving earlier each week until one day you realize summer is simply gone. There’s something about the change in light and temperature that makes me want to slow down and pay closer attention. Coffee by candlelight in the morning, a walk in the cool air, an afternoon of applesauce making or pie baking, and an evening under a blanket with a book and a cat who wants to rest on the blanket and snuggle. These are the seasonal rhythms that ground a life lived close to the earth. The ideas below are the things I actually do each fall to settle into the season and make the most of what it offers.
Eat Fall Seasonal Foods
Fall is the traditional harvest season for many cultures, and for good reason. The variety of foods available this time of year is abundant if you know where to look. Winter squashes in every shape and color, fresh-pressed apple cider, nuts coming down from the trees, and late-season fruits like apples, pears, quince, and persimmons. Seek out local farms and farmers markets where you can find varieties you’d never see at a grocery store. Cook them up in both sweet and savory dishes and preserve what you can for winter.
Make Applesauce
Fall is apple season and applesauce is one of the simplest things you can make from scratch. Apples and water, cooked until soft, mashed or pureed, and done. It can be canned or frozen for later. It’s worth having some in the pantry for snacking and baking, and the process of making it is one of those satisfying fall kitchen projects that makes the whole house smell good.
Make Something from Scratch
The shift to cooler temperatures is a natural invitation back into the kitchen. Pie, soup, a pot of something simmering for hours, hot chocolate on a rainy night. These are not just meals, they’re a way of marking the season and feeding people well. Follow the natural craving for warm, from-scratch food and get creative with what’s coming in from the garden and the market.
Gather Rose Hips
Rose hips are one of the most overlooked parts of fall. These small fruits are healing, tasty, and easy to work with. Dry them for use in tea, turn them into jelly or syrup. They’re a good source of vitamin C for when cold and flu season hits.
Dig Up Some Medicinal Roots
Fall is one of the best times to harvest medicinal roots. As plants put their energy back into the roots before winter, the beneficial compounds concentrate there. Dandelion root supports liver health and makes a good tea. Valerian root can help ease insomnia. Echinacea root is worth making into a tincture to have on hand through cold season. Horseradish root makes a warming fire cider that earns its place in the fall medicine cabinet.
Preserve Winter Squash
Winter squash stores remarkably well in a cool, dry spot and generally doesn’t need any special treatment unless one starts to soften. When you do have extra cooked squash to use up, freeze it in portions for smoothies, soups, or baking through winter. Seek out local or heirloom varieties if you can find them, they tend to store well and come in a wider range of flavors and textures.
Roast the Squash Seeds
Don’t let the seeds go to waste. Spread them on a baking sheet, drizzle with olive oil, sprinkle with salt, and roast at 300 degrees for about 40 minutes, stirring occasionally, until lightly browned and crunchy. Season however you like. It’s a simple snack that uses something most people throw away.
Save a Few Seeds
Gather seeds from a favorite flower, vegetable, or squash and save them for next year. Marigolds, calendula, peas, beans, and winter squash are all good places to start. You don’t need to save enough to fill a garden. Even a small envelope of seeds to plant next spring or share with a gardening friend is worth the few minutes it takes. Share extras with your local seed library.
Plant a Tree or Perennial
Fall is a genuinely good time to plant. Nurseries often discount trees and perennials as the season winds down, and planting now gives roots time to establish before spring. If you’ve been thinking about adding a fruit tree or a patch of perennial herbs, this is the season to do it.
Embrace the Seasonal Darkness
The shortening days are one of the harder parts of fall for many people. The shift is real and worth acknowledging rather than just pushing through. At our house, we lean into it. Candles lit in the morning with coffee, lamps on earlier in the evening, slower nights that aren’t scheduled around anything. The darkness is an invitation to rest in a way that the long days of summer don’t allow. Let the evenings be quieter. It doesn’t fix everything but it does make the season feel less like something to endure and more like something with its own particular gifts.
Connect with Nature
Go for a walk and take in the fall colors before they’re gone. Notice how the sounds have changed from summer, fewer insects, different birds. Walk at sunrise or just before dark to catch the light at its best. Getting outside even briefly on a cool fall day tends to reset something that gets stuck when we stay in too long. While this can be a drive to a more remote location and a hike into the woods, it doesn’t have to be, a walk around the block counts.
Write a Letter
There is no specific season for letter writing, we can and should do it all the time, but there is something about the darker and cooler days that can inspire us to take pen to paper. Write a letter to a friend you haven’t caught up with in a while. It doesn’t have to be long. Tuck a few small seeds or pressed leaves inside and allow it to be a connection across the miles that texts and emails can’t replicate.
Dip Leaves in Wax
Melt paraffin or beeswax in a double boiler and dip colorful fall leaves into the wax. Hang them over newspaper to dry, then string them together for simple garland, use them as place cards, or arrange them around candles as a table centerpiece. It’s a simple way to honor the changing colors and bring some nature inside the home.
Take in Community Events
Go to the harvest festival, do the corn maze, pick apples at a local orchard, drink freshly pressed cider from a farm stand. These seasonal events are worth making time for, not just for the fun of them but for the community connections they build. Talk with the farmers. Get to know the people around you.
If you’re looking for more ways to slow down and stay connected to the season, The Letter Circle might be a good fit. It’s a monthly subscription that brings one private email and one physical letter to your door, written in the same unhurried spirit as everything on this blog.
Oh goodness, I can’t wait. We’ve been getting hints of almost autumnlike air (drier and relatively cooler), and it’s been lovely. Not quite cool enough to convince my husband to open the windows yet, but we’ll get there. Almost time to put in the fall garden, too, just have to finish outside post-Irma cleanup first. Then bed prepping and planting. My daughter was outside the other day cleaning up her butterfly garden and planting some more flowers–love to see her enjoying it!
This is just lovely! Don’t you have a book with some of these ideas in it?
I love your idea of dipping leaves in wax and using for decorations. When I was a child, we put colored leaves between sheets of waxed paper then ironed the paper to melt the wax and seal the leaves in.
@Denise, I remember doing that too. Such a fun stained glass craft.