September Homestead to Do List

Harvests, Chores and Winter Prep

September is when the heat of our short Northern summer breaks. The weather abruptly shifts to cool and breezy, with heavy morning fog and a crisp chill in the air that sometimes lasts all day.

Highs are usually in the 60’s and 70’s at the beginning of the month, and 40’s and 50’s overnight…but they’re cooling off rapidly, and we’ll often have our first frosts in September.

This month is all about pulling in the bulk harvests of all the long-season vegetables, and preparing for winter and heating season.

I often get requests for a month-by-month “homestead to-do list,” largely from people who are living in the city but planning to homestead someday. Everyone wants to see what their year will look like, in a month-by-month way.

What are you doing in January anyway?

It’s really impossible to answer, as every climate and homestead is a bit different, but what I can give you is a look into what our life here in Vermont looks like on a month-by-month basis.

Here’s what September looks like here in Vermont, and I hope to add a new post as each month goest by for the rest of the year.

This is a shortened version of a new post on the blog titled September Homestead To Do list. You can read the full post on the blog, with everything we work on this time of year. This version has been cut down to fit better into an email, and most of the pictures have been removed because of email size limits.

In The Garden

Our growing season is a painfully short 100 frost-free days, and sometimes we're lucky, and we’ll get 120 or even 130…but don’t count on it. September is when all the long-season vegetables ripen, all at once. (And hopefully, they make it before frosts.)

We’re harvesting tomatoes, eggplants, and peppers by the wheelbarrow full. In some cases, as with tomatoes…it’ll be 2-3 full-sized adult wheelbarrows a week. With eggplants and peppers, the little ones get their turn, and they’ll fill their child-sized wheelbarrow to the brim. It’s smaller, but that’s still around 25 pounds of eggplant this week…

This time of year, we’re harvesting (and preserving):

• Tomatoes

• Peppers (Hot and Sweet)

• Eggplant

• Herbs ~ Basil, Oregano, Thyme, Tulsi

• Husk Cherries

• Summer and Winter Squash

• Cucumbers

Next month in October, we’ll expect lots more winter storage squash and the main storage potato harvest.

We’ll also begin to pull in some of the cold hardy vegetables like scallions, brussels sprouts, carrots, beets, cilantro, and cabbage, but those will hold on right out in the garden all the way into mid-November. (And in some cases, all winter long until spring.)

In the Orchard

Much of our homestead is centered around perennials, especially perennial fruits, but also some perennial vegetables.

In September, we’re mostly harvesting and preserving:

• Elderberries

• Aronia

• Plums

• Fall Raspberries

• Fall Blueberries

• Everbearing Strawberries

• Early Apples

• Pears

• Grapes

(Yes, grapes do thrive in zone 4, and there are about a dozen that grow well in zone 3 too. Since so many of you asked, here’s a list of cold-hardy grape varieties. We grow about a dozen, but there are nearly 40 to choose from.)

There are still thimbleberries, blackberries, lingonberries, and a handful of other fruits as well.

In the Kitchen

This time of year, the kitchen is all about preservation.

Sure, I’d like to bake a loaf of bread or, honestly, even prepare a decent meal…but there just isn’t the time or space. Late August into September is peak harvest season, and every spare counter is covered by something desperately needing preservation before it starts to turn.

It’s exhausting, but these six or so weeks of mad preservation only come once a year, and then things slow down.

Tomatoes are getting turned into canned whole tomatoes, tomato sauce, diced tomatoes, tomato paste, spaghetti sauce, and tomato jam.

Sweet peppers canned as roasted peppers and hot peppers turn into pickled peppers and fermented hot sauce.

Eggplant is tricky to preserve, and there are plenty of traditional eggplant fermentation recipes, but they really alter the flavor and character, turning it into more of a pickle or condiment. I love using it in soups, stews, and curries, so in the past, I’ve just frozen it as roasted eggplant. This year, it’s all going into our freeze dryer (affiliate link), and I think they’ll be a lot more versatile come this winter.

Zucchini and Summer Squash are put up in zucchini canning recipes or grated and frozen. This year, they’re also being freeze-dried.

Plums are going into whole canned plums, plum jam, and plum wine.

Grapes become canned grape juice, grape jam, grape jelly, canned whole grapes, raisins, and wine (or pyment, which is grape mead).

Elderberries are turned into elderberry wine, elderberry syrup, and elderberry tincture/cordial.

In the Woods and Fields

September is a great time to forage, but I’ll admit, I only get out a few times this month with all that’s going on. Still, it’s a great time to harvest:

• Wild Grapes (Made into wild grape jelly and wine, but there are extra preparation steps when working with wild grapes.)

• Wild Elderberries (Used like regular elderberries)

• Himalayan Balsam (related to Jewelweed, and used in topical salves)

• Wild Quinoa (seeds from lambs quarters)

• Wild Raisin (Viburnum Species)

• Shaggy Mane Mushrooms

• Puffball Mushrooms

• Chanterelles

• Chicken of the Woods (Mostly harvested in August, but it’s often still available in early September)

• Hen of the Woods (Late September)

• Black Walnuts

• Butternuts

Next month in October, there’s actually a lot more available as all the long-season fruits come to bear, including crabapples, hawthorn, nannyberry, hobbleberry, and many more. The autumn mushrooms really pick up in October as well, and we’ll be harvesting lion’s mane and many others as well.

In the House

The heating season starts in September, so if we don’t have all our wood stacked and stored by now, we’re in trouble. And honestly, that’s usually the case. We’re still packing in wood into the boiler shed in September almost every year.

Summer is spectacular here, and every year we have to decide whether we’re going to buckle down and get it early…or sneak in one last trip to the lake with the kids…knowing that we’ll still have more wood to stack come September. Every year, the lake wins, and I watch my babies splash to their heart’s content.

The cool September air is better for wood stacking anyway…

It’s also the time of year when we check on our off-grid systems, do any pre-winter battery maintenance, test our standby generator, and generally prepare to maintain all our off-grid systems all winter through the snow and ice storms ahead.

We’ll top off our food stores with the few bulk things we don’t grow ourselves, mostly flour, rice, and dry beans. That’s a lot of bulk to haul in over the snow, and we’d rather just store a winter’s worth in gamma seal buckets down in the basement.

In the Barn

At this point, we only have baby chicks, but in the past, we’ve had a whole menagerie to tend. Ducks, geese, pigs, goats, bees…everything short of a partridge in a pear tree (though there’s no shortage of pear trees, and we considered guinea hens…which aren’t all that different than partridges.)

Generally, this time of year, we’d be evaluating our animals and deciding who we plan to overwinter on the hoof, and who’ll be spending the winter in the freezer.

October is the best time to process meat, as the weather’s cool enough to hang the animals to chill, and the early frosts have killed off the flies. September is a time of decisions, but all the action will happen a bit later.

Winter here means six months of hauling buckets of water across the ice to animals out in the barns, twice a day during the coldest part of the year. We don’t overwinter any more than is strictly necessary for the following year.

For the animals that are staying, this is the month where we’d pack in feed for the next 6 months. It’s easy to get hurt hauling feed sacks and hay through snow/ice, and there’s no reason for it if it can be avoided. There are also often feed shortages in mid-winter, and no one will sell you hay once the snow starts to fly.

For chicken and pig feed, we store it in galvanized trash cans to protect it from rodents, and a single can will hold around 150 pounds of feed. (You can extrapolate out how much you need by reading my articles on how much it costs to keep chickens and how much it costs to keep pigs.)

In the Community

September is also when all the best country fairs happen, at least the old-time-y ones. Sure, there are fairs in the summer, but they’re mostly centered around amusement park rides and fried Oreos.

Our favorite fairs are the ones with animal exhibits, oxen pulls, shelf after shelf of preserves judged and rated, and barns full of quilts, farm machinery, and displays where they bring the old technology back to life.

An ice cream maker powered by a 1928 tractor.

We’ll spend the day watching men shape 14’’ square timbers for timber frames, turn logs into pipes and aqueducts, run horse-powered corn shuckers, make hooked rugs, churn butter, and a thousand other things that were once a daily part of life.

There may, or may not, also be corn dogs and carrousel rides…but that’s just the icing on the cake. The main dish is a trip back in time.

Besides the country fairs, it’s also when neighbors share the bounty of their garden with each other.

Sure, there’s the non-consensual zucchini you’ll find on your porch, hanging in a bag from your mailbox, or even in the back seat of your car all summer long, but Steptember’s harvests push everything into high gear, and seemingly everyone has something to share.

We’ll offer up everything we can’t preserve, and our neighbors will do the same. This year, we were gifted bucket after bucket of hops (for the price of harvesting them at a neighbor’s house), 10 pounds of husk cherries (for husk cherry jam, wine, and salsa), and more cucumbers than I can count.

We share our homebrewed beer and wine, dozens of jars of jams and jellies, and in the past, our home-cured pork and smoked duck.

Everyone wins in this season of abundance.

What happens in September in your part of the world?

What are you harvesting, preserving, building, or exploring on your homestead this week? I’d love to hear about it!

Leave me a note in the comments…

(Comments only, please. Emails tend to get lost in my inbox, and as much as I’d love to get back to each and everyone, my screen time is very limited…and things fall through the cracks, and emails get buried in my inbox. If you comment here, they’re all in one place, and it’s much easier to get back to every single one.)

Until Next Time,

Ashley at Practical Self Reliance