10 Fall Harvest Hobbies That Turn Small Actions Into Neighborhood Traditions

I nearly had a shock when my 6-year-old, Harper, came home crying after playing at our elderly neighbor Mr. Malvin’s house. I checked her for injuries, but she just sobbed, “It’s not fair! He put names in a hat and Leo got to use the big machine! I had to peel the fruits!” Then I noticed her shirt was covered in red juice and she smelled like pomegranate.
A minute later, Mr. Malvin knocked on the door holding a jar of fresh juice and a pomegranate. Turns out they’d been making juice with his old lever press. He does that every fall. The kids fought over who got to use it, so he held a raffle. Harper lost, tried squeezing one herself, and accidentally dumped juice all over her shirt. He apologized and offered her the pomegranate. “I saved this one for you. Come back tomorrow and be Chief Juicer. No raffles.” Harper immediately stopped crying. “Can I crush the cucumber too?” He laughed. “Anything you want. Just ask your mom to forgive me for the shirt.”

Moved to Burlington, VT Oct 12, 2021 and had no clue about yards. My rake snapped, cheap blue. My neighbor Mrs. Alvarez across Pine Street came over with her grandson Leo and her old Toro mower. She showed me you don’t rake for mulch, you run the mower over dry maple leaves to shred them first. We did my whole tiny yard and bagged it for her raised beds. Half our street started doing it that month because she made it so simple. That little bit of compassion when you’re new somewhere brings a weird amount of happiness.

10 years ago I was in a small group that came to each others home to do scrapbooking and card making. We had a lot of fun. Shared new ideas and gave each other tips on new products while we created scrapbooking pages and greeting cards.

Raking leaves up into a big pile and jumping into them. My best friend down the street had a swing made from a truck tire hung from a tree branch with rope. It swung out from the top of a very small hill over a depression in the ground. We put the leaves there, swung out and dropped into the leaves. It was thrilling!

My family gathered leaves from the Maple tree in our back yard put them between 2 pieces of waxed paper along with piece’s of broken crayon run the iron over them to melt the crayon. my mom kept them on wall till she switched to Christmas decorations.

My Honeycrisp tree in Lancaster, PA went insane in Oct 2022. I bought that VEVOR press on Amazon for $189 thinking I’d make a few gallons. Put it in the driveway with a sign “Bring apples — we’ll press together.” My buddy Jake from Lancaster Food Co-op said no one would come. Three kids came with grocery bags of crabapples from their yard. I learned you can’t press just crabapples, so we mixed them maybe 1 part crabapple to 4 parts Honeycrisp for tartness. We ended up with 14 gallons total over the month, not 40 — that would’ve needed 600 lbs. Teaching them how to safely use the grinder without catching fingers was a real Life skill. My neighbor Carlos still texts every Oct 1st: “press working?”

I was trying to make perfect gourd birdhouses with my 9-year-old nephew using my Dremel, being super uptight about it. He picked the ugliest, potato-shaped gourd. I did the drilling part with a hand drill while he held it with gloves — no way I’m giving a kid a Dremel. He then painted it neon green and wrote FREE HOUSE FOR BIRDS in Sharpie, and hung it on our neighbor’s fence because “more birds over there.” I felt dumb for overcomplicating it. Now three houses on our street do that, hanging houses for each other. I have a lot of Gratitude that he showed me how to not make a hobby stressful. WNC Farmers Market, Asheville, NC, I think it was Nov 2020.

We carve/paint/hammer pins into pumpkins, make leaf crowns, do leaf imprints with crayons and paper or paper and paint; make pumpkin cookies and pumpkin roll, and go to a pumpkin patch and orchard at least once. We also watch fall movies like great pumpkin( Charlie brown), Garfields thanksgiving, the old old animated Casper the friendly ghost, and we read lots of fall/Halloween themed books. My favorite books are big pumpkin (with different voices for each character), little critter Halloween, the little old lady who wasn’t afraid of anything, you’re my little pumpkin pie, and any character books that have a Halloween/fall theme. We love fall!

Ruth is 74, runs East Side Garden Club in Madison, WI. Since fall 2019 she’s had a pallet-wood cart at end of her driveway. Idea was extra kale, but she quickly learned if you leave stuff out overnight raccoons destroy it. So she brings in a cooler at night and puts it out 8am-6pm, checks twice a day. I started adding tomatoes and Ball jars of salsa. Last October someone left a half-bushel of Cortland apples, maybe $30 worth, with a handwritten apple butter recipe. From Sept to Nov it’s never empty long. It’s quiet Compassion, but it’s managed, which is why it actually works and hasn’t been shut down by the city.

We moved to a place on Cayuga Street in Ithaca, New York back in August 2023 and I grew like 35 butternut squash — way too many. Instead of leaving them on porches, I left them at the very edge of driveways in New York with a note “Free — from #42, too many!” My neighbor Pat caught me on his Ring and texted me first like “hey can I post this funny clip?” I said yeah. People started leaving recipes under my mat. He hosted soup night in his garage in New York in late October — 12 of us, two Instant Pots, but we roasted the squash in his oven first because you can’t just chunk raw butternut. It was awkward then really fun. That accidental human connection still happens every late October now.