The Stillroom Calendar: September

The Beginning of the Keeping Season

September is an uncertain month.

The calendar may be edging toward autumn, but the garden has not necessarily agreed. Tomatoes may still be ripening. Herbs may still be lush. Some afternoons feel thoroughly like summer, while an evening suddenly carries that unmistakable warning that the year is turning.

Our ancestors knew this problem too.

John Evelyn, writing in his seventeenth-century Kalendarium Hortense, begins his September instructions with an important qualification:

“Gather now (if ripe)…”

The calendar supplied the rhythm. The season made the final decision.

That may be one of the most useful habits we can recover for a modern Stillroom.

September is not necessarily autumn.

September is the beginning of keeping season.

And keeping meant considerably more than preserving food.

It meant looking at the harvest, certainly, but also at the house, the garden, the animals, the fuel, the light, the tools and stores that would carry a household through the colder months ahead.

The Household Had a Calendar

Long before printed wall calendars told us when to decorate for fall, agricultural and household writers organized work according to the turning year.

Thomas Tusser's Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry, expanded through the sixteenth century, arranged a remarkable amount of rural and household work by month. His September material includes fruit gathering, sowing, drainage and fences, hops, bees, storage, tools, materials and the approach of Michaelmas.

A century later, John Evelyn's Kalendarium Hortense, first published in 1664, provided another month-by-month guide. September brought instructions for gathering winter fruit, collecting windfalls, sowing winter vegetables, transplanting edible and medicinal plants, protecting plants as the weather changed, managing bees and continuing cider making.

Not all of this happened literally inside a stillroom.

That distinction matters.

The historical household was a network. Garden, orchard, yard, barn, kitchen, dairy, brewhouse, pantry, cellar, store room and stillroom fed one another.

A basket of apples gathered outside might become fruit for storage, slices drying overhead, pies in the kitchen, cider in the press, vinegar later in the year and finally feed or compost from what remained.

A sheep, a field of flax, a hive of bees or a stack of wood also eventually entered the household in transformed forms: cloth, candles, wax, honey, fuel, bedding, cordage or household goods.

The Stillroom Calendar follows those movements.

We are interested not simply in what grew in September, but in what the household did to prepare for what came next.

September's First Task: Pay Attention

Evelyn does not say to gather every apple because September has arrived. He says to gather the winter fruits if they are ripe. That small phrase may be the foundation of the whole calendar. Historical seasonal living required observation.

• Is the fruit ripe?

• Has the rain come?

• Are strong winds threatening the orchard?

• Are seeds dry enough to gather?

• Are the nights suddenly colder?

• Does something need to come indoors?

• Is there a repair that will be much less pleasant to make after the weather changes?

Our modern calendars often reverse this relationship. We look at the date and decide what season we are supposed to be having.

The older household looked outside.

Try It as a Family

Take a walk around your own home together. Not an inspection. Not a chore marathon. Just look.

What is ready in the garden?

What is going to seed?

Do you see a loose hinge, a drafty window, a gutter that needs attention, a pile of wood that needs stacking, herbs ready to dry or apples beginning to fall?

Ask everyone one question:

What do you notice changing?

That is where the September calendar begins.

Gather Carefully

Fruit occupies a wonderful amount of Evelyn's September attention.

Apples. Pears. Plums. Quinces. Grapes. Peaches lingering in a late year.

He advises gathering winter fruits before high winds knock them down and collecting windfalls daily, preferably in dry weather.

Tusser is equally interested in bringing the harvest safely into storage.

A bruised apple has a different future from an unblemished storage apple.

And that leads to one of the central jobs of keeping season:

Decide what each thing should become.

The soundest fruit might be stored.

Fruit that will not keep might be eaten immediately.

Some can become pies, sauces or preserves.

Some can be dried.

Some can be pressed.

Some can be fermented.

The household did not merely ask:

What have we harvested?

It also had to ask:

What should this become?

That question will follow us throughout the Stillroom Calendar.

Begin Putting By

September stands between abundance and scarcity.

That does not mean winter is imminent. It means that foods available in abundance now may be transformed into forms that remain useful after their fresh season has passed.

An apple eaten from the tree belongs to September.

A dried apple eaten in February belongs to September too.

So does a jar of apple butter, a bottle of cider or a crock of vinegar begun while the orchard was heavy with fruit.

This is the logic of keeping.

Drying, fermenting, preserving and storing move the harvest through time.

Evelyn's September instructions contain the wonderfully compact reminder:

“Cider-making continues.”

Three words, and an entire September afternoon appears.

We will return to those apples later this month.

Look Up: The Harvest May Be Hanging Over Your Head

Some September foods did not immediately disappear into jars.

They hung.

Apples could be dried. Beans were strung into what later Appalachian households would famously call leather britches or shucky beans. Peppers could be threaded. Herbs hung in bunches. Onions and garlic might be cured and braided. Other fruits and vegetables could be spread on cloths, racks or drying surfaces.

Drying changed both the food and the room around it.

Imagine entering a working household during keeping season.

Bundles overhead.

Braids against a wall.

Seeds drying.

Fruit waiting to be sorted.

Something fermenting.

Something steeping.

Something being saved because it would be wanted months from now.

Later this month we will look much more closely at hanging, stringing, braiding and drying the harvest.

For now, remember the principle.

Before mechanical refrigeration, preservation often depended upon controlling air, moisture, temperature and time.

The equipment has changed.

The principles have not.

The House Begins to Turn Inward

Here is the part of September we can easily overlook.

The harvest was not the only thing requiring attention.

The household itself needed to be made ready.

Research into early modern working lives shows that as the year moved into autumn and winter, household work increasingly revolved around providing food, fire and light, along with textile work, care work and maintenance. Darkness itself changed the working day because candles and fire were valuable resources rather than things summoned at the flick of a switch.

Tusser's calendar provides wonderful glimpses of this transition.

Around the late-summer fairs he advises buying what is needed to repair the house.

As autumn advances he becomes increasingly concerned with bringing fuel home before winter weather interferes.

And elsewhere in his household advice comes an instruction that could almost have been written for Stillroom:

“Provide for thy tallow, ere frost commeth in,

and make thine owne candle, ere winter begin.”

He does not say, “On the seventh day of September, make candles.”

He is describing something more useful.

Look ahead.

Winter will require light.

Winter will require fuel.

The house will need to be sound.

Do not wait until the need arrives to begin preparing for it.

Preparing the House

For a historical household, household preparation could involve repairs to buildings and storage areas, tending fences and drainage, maintaining equipment and getting necessary materials while weather and markets allowed.

Our version need not involve reroofing the barn before supper.

But September is a wonderful time to walk through the house and ask what winter will magnify.

That loose weather stripping?

The window that does not quite shut?

The flashlight with dead batteries?

The basket with the broken handle?

The blanket that needs washing?

The coat with a missing button?

The fireplace tools buried somewhere behind the summer furniture?

None of these things is dramatic.

That is precisely why they are easy to postpone.

As a Family

Choose one small repair each week.

Sew on the button.

Oil the squeaky hinge.

Fix the basket handle.

Replace the batteries.

Wash the blankets.

Put the umbrellas where people can actually find them.

The goal is not to “winterize” your entire existence.

It is to make one small thing ready before you need it.

Preparing Light

Light was work.

That sentence is difficult for us to feel.

We touch a switch and a room becomes bright. Earlier households had to acquire the material, prepare it, make or purchase candles, tend lamps or fires, trim wicks and use illumination carefully.

Early-modern records repeatedly show how valuable light could be. People sometimes went to neighbors specifically to obtain a light or flame.

Tusser's instruction to provide tallow before frost and make candles before winter therefore belongs to a much larger household reality.

September may be the beginning of our own season of light.

Perhaps your family does not need to make enough candles to illuminate a farmhouse until March.

You might, however, make two.

Dip beeswax tapers together.

Roll beeswax candles with children.

Learn how a wick works.

Talk about why beeswax and tallow mattered.

Then use the candles over dinner one evening.

The activity stops being a craft project and becomes an experiment:

What does the room feel like when this is all the light you have?

That is history you can see flickering on the wall.

Preparing Warmth

Fuel similarly occupied part of the household economy.

Later in the autumn Tusser specifically urges getting wood home while the weather remains good rather than waiting for winter to prevent the work.

Not every modern household heats with wood, but every household has a version of this problem.

How will we stay warm?

If you use a fireplace or wood stove, begin checking the fuel supply.

If you do not, perhaps September is when the furnace filter gets checked, blankets come out of storage or the draft at the back door finally receives attention.

A family might gather kindling together after a windy day.

Children can collect suitable fallen sticks.

Someone can stack wood.

Someone else can bring out the basket kept near the hearth.

There is a quiet satisfaction in looking at a neatly filled wood basket and knowing that a future cold evening has already been provided for.

That is keeping too.

Preparing Cloth and Clothing

The colder half of the year also shifted work increasingly toward cloth, spinning, mending and other household production. Research into early-modern work shows spinning, carding and textile work becoming particularly important during the winter months when more work moved into and around the household.

September does not need to become “everyone spin flax.”

But the underlying household habit transfers beautifully.

Look at the textiles that will shortly matter again.

Blankets.

Quilts.

Coats.

Gloves.

Scarves.

Table linens.

Bedding.

Perhaps something only needs washing.

Perhaps something needs a button.

Perhaps the beautiful blanket shoved into the back of a cupboard deserves to come out.

Perhaps an old shirt has reached the end of its life as clothing but could become cleaning cloths.

The keeping household looked not only at what it could acquire, but at what it could maintain, mend and reuse.

September Was Also a Time to Plant

Keeping season is not entirely about endings.

Evelyn's September calendar includes sowing lettuce, radish, spinach, parsnips, skirrets, cabbage and onions. He recommends transplanting edible and “physical,” or medicinal, plants and working with artichokes, asparagus and strawberries.

This is worth remembering.

September is not simply the month in which the garden dies.

It is also a month of continuation.

Some plants are being gathered.

Some are being stored.

Some are being divided or moved.

Some are being planted for another season entirely.

The household calendar always seems to have one hand closing a door while the other opens the next.

We should not copy a seventeenth-century English planting calendar blindly into a modern American garden.

We can copy the habit.

Ask what your own climate allows you to plant, move, divide or prepare now.

Do Not Forget the Bees

Evelyn includes bees among September's concerns, advising that the entrances of hives being kept should be narrowed and that attention continue against wasps and other robbing insects.

Honey and wax were both household resources.

Honey sweetened and preserved.

Wax illuminated, sealed, polished and protected.

And the hive itself required seasonal care.

Even those of us without hives can participate in this part of the calendar.

Notice the late pollinators.

Notice what is still blooming.

Leave useful late flowers where appropriate.

Learn where your local honey comes from.

The household economy has never really stopped at the household door.

Michaelmas: September's Turning Point

The end of September carried additional significance in the English agricultural calendar.

Michaelmas, the feast of St. Michael on September 29, was one of the great markers of the rural year. Tusser repeatedly uses Michaelmas as an agricultural and economic boundary in his September instructions.

We need not recreate that system to appreciate the usefulness of a seasonal reckoning point.

The end of September is a good time for a family to sit together and ask:

What came in?

What did we grow?

What did we preserve?

What do we have too much of?

What are we nearly out of?

What needs repairing?

What will we need when the weather turns?

What did we intend to do this summer and never quite manage?

Historical households could not afford to lose track of their stores.

Modern households benefit from knowing what they have too.

A September Weekend at Home

You do not need to transform your household into a seventeenth-century manor to participate in the rhythm of September.

Pick one pleasant afternoon.

Put on music.

Open a few windows if the weather allows.

Let everyone choose something.

One person can sort the apples.

Someone else can gather herbs.

A child can collect seed heads or kindling.

Someone can inventory the pantry.

Someone can mend a coat or repair a basket.

Wash the blankets and hang them outside.

Bring the candles out.

Make two new ones if you are feeling ambitious.

Put cider in the refrigerator.

Cook something that uses what is abundant rather than what a recipe decided ought to be in season.

At the end of the day, do not measure success by the number of jobs completed.

Look at what changed.

There may be herbs hanging in the kitchen.

Apples sorted into bowls.

A clean pantry shelf.

A repaired coat.

A basket of kindling.

Two new candles.

A blanket smelling of outdoor air.

None of these things is enormous.

Together they say:

We noticed the season changing, and we made the house a little more ready for it.

That is the work of keeping.

Your Modern September Stillroom

Choose only what suits your household. September is an invitation, not an examination.

Gather: Pick ripe fruit, collect windfalls, gather herbs, save seed and notice what is abundant locally.

Keep: Dry, freeze, preserve, ferment or store something for later.

Prepare: Clean jars and crocks, check pantry stores, sharpen tools and make space for the harvest still to come.

Repair: Mend one piece of clothing, basket, tool, hinge, window or household item before winter makes the problem larger.

Warm: Check firewood, heating supplies, blankets or whatever your household relies upon for colder weather.

Light: Make a candle, check lamps or emergency lights, and notice how much earlier the evening is beginning.

Tend: Plant, divide or transplant what is appropriate to your own climate and pay attention to late pollinators.

Share: Give away surplus produce, trade with a neighbor or turn an afternoon's work into something the family does together.

Notice: Step outside at dusk and ask what has changed since August.

The September Stillroom:

Make, Tend, Enjoy

Every month in the Stillroom Calendar will end with three small invitations.

They are not assignments.

Think of them as ways to put one hand on the season.

Make: A First Cup of Cider

Evelyn tells us simply that cider-making continues in September.

Later this month we will follow the apple much further: drying, apple butter, cider, hard cider, vinegar and all the useful things that can happen before the final remnants return to the soil.

For today, keep it simple.

Find fresh cider.

Drink it cold if September is still pretending to be August.

Warm it if evening has other ideas.

Sometimes the first work of the Stillroom is simply recognizing that an ingredient has returned.

Tend: One Thing for Winter

Not the entire house.

One thing.

Mend a glove.

Wash a blanket.

Clean a pantry shelf.

Stack a basket of wood.

Check a window.

Put fresh batteries in the flashlight.

Find the candleholders.

The historical household prepared for winter because it had to.

We can borrow the wisdom without borrowing the hardship.

Enjoy: Light a Candle at Dusk

Turn off the electric lights for a little while.

Light one candle.

Pour the cider.

Sit together.

Notice how close everyone naturally gathers to the light.

Notice how different familiar objects look.

Notice how quickly darkness fills the parts of the room the candle cannot reach.

For earlier households, this was ordinary.

For us, it can be a small way of understanding something our electric world has taught us to forget.

Then turn the lights back on.

History need not require stumbling over the furniture.

The Beginning of the Keeping Season

The great lesson of the historical household calendar is not that we should perform exactly the same work our predecessors performed.

Our houses are different.

Our tools are different.

Our food systems are different.

Our knowledge is different.

Our climate may be an ocean away from the writers whose calendars survive.

But the questions remain surprisingly useful.

What is ready?

What is abundant?

What needs tending?

What needs mending?

What will keep us warm?

What will give us light?

What can be saved?

What should be used now?

What will we be glad to have later?

Perhaps that is what a modern Stillroom Calendar can recover.

Not an endless schedule of chores.

Not nostalgia for a supposedly simpler past that was anything but simple.

A habit of looking ahead.

Of noticing.

Of using what we have well.

Of making things before we need them.

Of allowing a family, in whatever form that family takes, to participate together in the turning year.

September is not quite summer.

It may not quite be autumn.

It is a hinge between them.

The month when the harvest begins coming indoors and, little by little, the household begins turning inward too.

The keeping season has begun.

Historical Sources

**Thomas Tusser, **Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry

Tusser's sixteenth-century work organizes agricultural and household work through the year. His September material gives us fruit, hops, repairs, husbandry and Michaelmas, while his wider autumn and household instructions show preparations for fuel, light and winter, including his memorable direction to provide tallow and make candles before winter begins.

**John Evelyn, **Kalendarium Hortense; or, The Gard'ners Almanac

First published in 1664, Evelyn's month-by-month calendar provides especially useful September instructions concerning winter fruits, edible and medicinal plants, bees, changing weather and cider-making.

The Experience of Work in Early Modern England

Modern scholarship using early-modern records helps us see the broader seasonal rhythm behind prescriptive calendars: autumn and winter increased the importance of household work, fire and light provision, care work, textiles, mending and work performed in and around the house.

Coming Next in The Stillroom Calendar

From the Rafters: Hanging, Stringing, Braiding and Drying the Harvest