9 Things Pennsylvanians Change the Week Fall Truly Arrives

Pennsylvania doesn’t ease into fall as gradually as the leaves might suggest.

One chilly week flips routines across the state and makes summer feel farther away than it did a few days earlier.

These are the things Pennsylvanians change the week fall truly arrives.

1. Deer Season Prep

Pennsylvania’s bow hunters go from casual to serious the week fall arrives.

Archery deer season already opened September 19 in the suburban Wildlife Management Units around Philadelphia and Pittsburgh.

The statewide bow opener follows October 3.

That two-week head start is deliberate.

The Pennsylvania Game Commission built the early start into the suburban units, where managing the deer herd matters as much as the hunting season does.

All of this year’s deer seasons include the Sundays that fall inside their date ranges, a change from past seasons that turns even a Sunday into a hunting day.

Not everyone hunts.

But households with a hunter in them start clearing space in the chest freezer, hanging a stand back up, and checking trail cameras they haven’t looked at since summer.

2. Bloomsburg Weekend Plans

Pennsylvania families who’ve never set foot in Columbia County suddenly know exactly where Bloomsburg is the week fall arrives.

The Bloomsburg Fair, the state’s largest agricultural fair, opens a nine-day run September 25 and runs through October 3.

Locals plan around it.

Farm families spend the week before finishing livestock entries, packing camping gear, and lining up canning jars for the exhibit hall judges.

For a lot of central Pennsylvania, the fair functions as the unofficial closing bell on summer, days before a single leaf changes color.

3. Canning the Last Harvest

Pennsylvania gardeners treat the week fall arrives like a deadline.

Frost can reach Pennsylvania’s higher, mountain counties by late September, weeks before it touches the southeast.

Green tomatoes come off first.

Households race to pick whatever is still on the vine, then turn the kitchen into a canning line for tomatoes, applesauce, and chow-chow.

A tomato that survives a light frost can still ripen on a windowsill.

Green tomato relish is the backup plan for whatever won’t make it that far.

4. Storm Window Removal

Pennsylvania’s housing stock is old enough that many families still handle this chore by hand every fall.

The commonwealth’s median home dates to 1964, and its housing ranks as the fourth-oldest in the country, behind only New York, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island.

A quarter of homes predate 1940.

Houses that old often came with manual storm windows and screens built to swap twice a year, a system newer double-pane construction skips entirely.

Ladder days are back.

Once nighttime temperatures drop for good, that swap turns into a Saturday project, up and down a ladder, one window at a time.

5. Local Firewood Shopping

Pennsylvania households who heat with wood run into a standing rule right as they start restocking the woodpile for winter.

A spotted lanternfly quarantine covers 56 of Pennsylvania’s 67 counties, and it restricts moving firewood across those lines.

The bugs travel in bark.

State guidance points households toward buying or cutting firewood close to where it’ll burn, instead of trucking a load home from a camping trip outside the quarantine zone.

Families restocking the woodpile for the season now have to think about county lines, not just cord count.

6. Furnaces' First Test

Pennsylvania's oil- and propane-heated homes wake their systems up for the first time since spring the week fall arrives.

The Northeast, Pennsylvania included, accounts for 82% of the country's heating-oil households, per the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

That's a lot of furnaces.

Many families schedule the season's first oil delivery and a technician visit for the same week, since nobody wants to learn the furnace won't fire on the first cold morning.

Propane households run the same drill, topping off the tank and testing the appliance well before anyone needs the heat.

7. Adams County Orchards

Pennsylvania's fruit country gets busy the week fall arrives, and Adams County carries much of that traffic.

More than 120 fruit farms spread across the county's historic South Mountain Fruit Belt, covering roughly 20,000 acres of orchards.

The apples ripen in waves.

Weekend traffic on the back roads around Biglerville and Arendtsville picks up as families start filling bags straight off the tree instead of buying from a grocery bin.

Pennsylvania's Apple Harvest Festival doesn't open its gates until October 3.

The orchards themselves fill up the week before, since several fall varieties finish ripening ahead of the festival's tents going up.

8. Foliage Reports

Pennsylvania's conservation department turns its attention to leaves the same week fall arrives.

Pennsylvania's Department of Conservation and Natural Resources has opened its weekly fall foliage report in the final days of September each of the past two years.

The report becomes a habit.

Families start checking the report before picking a Saturday drive, the same way they'd check a forecast, aiming for whichever county already shows color.

Higher, northern counties tend to turn first, so the earliest reports usually send eager leaf-watchers toward the state's northern tier before the rest of Pennsylvania even starts to change.

9. Open Corn Mazes

Pennsylvania's agritourism farms flip over to fall hours the same week the season turns.

Lancaster County's Cherry Crest Adventure Farm moves to its fall schedule, Thursday through Saturday, starting September 24.

The switch happens fast.

Similar farms across the state follow the same seasonal switch within days of each other.

Straw bales replace the summer produce stands, and hayrides start running on weekends.

A field that grew feed corn all summer turns into a maze with a story stitched into its paths.