Autumn Vegetables: What's in Season September to November

Hello lovelies,

There is one moment in September when the market tips over. Last week the crates still held tomatoes and zucchini, and suddenly there are squashes beside them, the first parsnips, and cabbage that looks like it could last the whole winter. That is exactly what it does.

One thing first, because it matters here: we live in Bali now, and this rhythm does not exist here. There is a rainy season and a dry season, and the shops carry roughly the same things all year round. That is exactly why I miss September a little every year, and exactly why this post is written for anyone who has four proper seasons. The months in the table follow central European harvests, so shift them by a few weeks if your climate is milder or harsher.

Back when we still lived in Switzerland, those were my favourite weeks of the whole year, because they bring the widest range of anything. Summer has not quite gone, winter is already here, and both are on the table at the same time. The one thing I missed every year was the overview: what is actually in season now, what only arrives in November, and what is simply sitting there out of storage. So at some point I wrote it down.

Which vegetables are in season in autumn?

The short answer: more than at any other time of year. Autumn is the only stretch where the summer crops are still running and the winter crops have already started. That is why the market looks so full in October, and why right now is the easiest moment of the year to cook without imports.

One note on the table. The tick stands for a harvest running here, the S for produce out of storage from that same harvest. Unmarked does not mean you cannot buy it: it then comes from a heated greenhouse or from abroad, and both sit on the same shelf, often without the packaging making it obvious. If you want to be sure, check the country of origin and the month.

That is why I go to the market more often than to the shop in autumn, not on principle, but because the question answers itself there. What is on the table has been harvested. In a supermarket you have to dig the same information out of the small print.

The table below is sorted by the month a vegetable typically starts here. Where we have a guide of our own, it sits alongside, because that is where the detail on buying, cooking and storing lives.

What is not in that table matters just as much. Tomatoes, zucchini, eggplant and cucumbers do not vanish from the shelves in autumn, but they increasingly come from heated greenhouses or from abroad rather than from the field next door. How to use up and store the last of the summer is in our guide to summer vegetables.

What changes between September and November?

Three weeks decide whether your shopping basket tastes like summer or like winter. It helps to think of autumn not as one block but as three phases, each with its own character.

September is the handover. The last tomatoes are still there, the first squashes too, and mushroom season begins. This is the time for dishes that can take both: warm, but not yet heavy. At the market you can see the handover happening, because the same stalls are selling both at once. It is the only time of year when a tomato salad and a squash dish can come out of the same shop.

October is the peak. Practically everything is there at once, cabbage and squash and root vegetables and apples and chestnuts. If you want to cook without imported produce once a year, this is the month for it. In practice that means you do not have to think about it at all: almost everything on the shelf right now is also in season right now.

November narrows and sharpens at the same time. What is still standing in the field is built for it: Brussels sprouts, kale, savoy cabbage, leeks. Everything else comes out of storage, and that is not a downside. Cooking gets simpler at the same time, because the dishes start to resemble each other. Cabbage, root, potato, plus something acidic and something fatty: that is the basic pattern for the next four months.

Squash, brassicas and root vegetables

Almost everything that arrives in autumn belongs to one of three families, and each wants different handling.

Squash is the most obvious and the most forgiving. Hokkaido does not need peeling, butternut does, and the cooking times differ more than the varieties suggest. We took that apart in a separate guide to cooking pumpkin.

Brassicas are the underrated family. Savoy cabbage, kale, Brussels sprouts and white cabbage are close botanical relatives and completely different in the kitchen. They do share one thing: they take heat and time better than almost any other vegetable. With kale there is one more thing, and it is often told wrong: according to the BZfE, no frost is needed for the better flavour, low temperatures are enough.

If you only know cabbage boiled soft, cut it into strips once and sear it hard until the edges go dark. The difference between boiled and roasted cabbage is bigger than the difference between two varieties.

Root vegetables are the foundation. Carrots, parsnips, beets, celeriac and potatoes keep for months, taste different roasted than boiled, and carry any soup. We wrote up how to cook beets without red hands separately.

With potatoes, almost everything comes down to the variety and to where you keep them. Floury or waxy decides the dish, and the fridge is the wrong place for either. The detail sits in our guide to storing potatoes.

Two things fit none of the three families and still belong to autumn. Mushrooms are not strictly a vegetable at all, but they arrive exactly now, and a quick rinse is allowed, whatever the old kitchen rule says. Our guide to cooking mushrooms explains why that is.

Chestnuts are the second special case. They are more of a side than a vegetable and still carry any autumn dish, sweet or savoury. Score, roast, peel while hot, in that order, and the rest of it is in our guide to roasting chestnuts.

How do I store autumn vegetables?

Autumn vegetables are almost all keepers, and that is the reason there is anything to eat at all in winter. Cabbage, roots, potatoes and squash are built to last for months. What they need to do it, though, is not the same.

Cool and dark is the basic rule, and the fridge is not it. Potatoes lose their flavour in there, and squash wants cool but not cold: our guide gives 12 to 15 °C, with damage below 10 °C. Onions mostly want air. Leafy greens are the exception: lamb's lettuce and kale belong in the crisper drawer, and they only last a few days there.

A second point is about quantity. Stored vegetables only work if they get air and if damaged pieces are pulled out in time, because one rotting spot takes the rest of the crate with it. So I look through whatever is sitting there once a week, and it takes under two minutes.

One point that gets missed: apples and vegetables do not get along. Apples give off ripening gas, and everything stored next to them ages faster. Which variety keeps how long and which one bakes well is in our overview of apple varieties.

If you have bought more than you can get through in a week, freezing is the simplest answer. For soups and stews we have written down what survives the freezer and what does not, in the guide to freezing soup.

Why bother with seasonal at all?

Because in autumn the easiest route and the most sensible one happen to be the same. Germany's Federal Centre for Nutrition puts it plainly: fruit and vegetables harvested in the open field during their main season are particularly sustainable. That is exactly what is sitting in the crates right now, without anyone having to hunt for it.

The more interesting case is the one next to it. The BZfE points out that domestic produce from heated greenhouses is not automatically the better choice: where heating is involved, imported produce from southern countries can be the more climate-friendly alternative. So local does not always beat imported, only when it is also in season.

What comes out of that is less a set of categories than an order of preference. Field-grown in the main season sits at the top, air freight at the bottom, and in between lies everything that costs energy. Storage sits in that middle, and the BZfE describes it from both sides: storage causes CO2 emissions through the energy it uses, while also allowing regional producers to offer their fruit and vegetables all year round. The climate-friendliest choice, in the BZfE's framing, is produce that comes neither from a heated greenhouse nor from energy-intensive storage.

None of which is dramatic for the kitchen. Cabbage, root vegetables and potatoes have been bred for centuries to bridge the months without a harvest, and a whole squash keeps, in the BZfE's words, for several weeks to months in a cool, dry room. Putting things away in October mostly buys you time.

And one more reason that has nothing to do with climate: variety. Harvard puts it in a single line, that you should eat a variety of types and colors of produce in order to give your body the mix of nutrients it needs. In autumn that happens almost by itself, because orange, dark green, red and white are all in season at once.

What to cook with it

Autumn vegetables do not ask for complicated recipes, they ask for heat and time. Oven, pot, pan, in that order. The recipes below are sorted on that logic, and all of them are vegetarian.

What works across all three groups is the same basic structure: something sweet from the root vegetables, something bitter from the brassicas, something acidic right at the end. When an autumn dish tastes flat, it is almost always the last one that is missing.

Warming pots and everything off a sheet pan, the core of the season:

Pumpkin Soup

Autumnal oven veggies with vegan feta

Autumn minestrone with pumpkin and chestnuts

Parsnip soup with white beans

Salads and bowls, for the weeks when it is not yet cold all the way through:

Autumn salad with roasted pumpkin

Lamb’s lettuce with apple & lentils

Kale salad with orange and fennel

Fennel risotto with pears

And the sweet end of it, because apples, pears and chestnuts belong to the season just as much:

Vegan Swiss Apple Quiche / Pie

Vegan Chestnut Cake

Plum cake with healthy crumbles

Apple pancakes

If you are doing a big shop in October anyway, it pays to cook for several days at once. How we plan that is in our guide to cooking ahead.

What comes after November

Winter is not a gap, it is the storeroom. From December almost nothing new arrives, but most of it stays: cabbage, root vegetables, potatoes, onions, leeks. Alongside them are the leafy greens that take the cold, above all lamb's lettuce, which we call Nüsslisalat and which lasts all winter.

Brussels sprouts are the special case worth waiting for. According to the BZfE they stand in the field from October to March, and longer cold spells mellow the bitter compounds. If you tried them early in the season and were disappointed, try again in December.

What really changes from December is not the range but how you deal with it. In October you buy what looks fresh. From December you buy what keeps, and cook whatever fits from that. It is less spontaneous and considerably more relaxed, and it is the reason I like to put away a bit more than I actually need during autumn.

And if you have stored or frozen enough during autumn, January is not a problem, just a quieter kitchen. For the lamb's lettuce that carries us through those months, we collected the detail on season, washing and storing in a separate guide to lamb's lettuce.

Back then I noticed every year that autumn is the season where cooking takes the least effort. You do not have to search for anything, plan anything or substitute anything, you just take what is there. What is in your basket right now, and what are you still missing?

Yours, Verena

Recipes to try

Pumpkin soup with apple and parsnip

Mushroom Fennel Risotto with Smoked Tofu

Cauliflower-Potato Soup

Kohlrabi and parsnip soup