The most abundant season
If spring in the Korean countryside is about gathering what the hillside offers, and summer is about water and waiting, autumn is about receiving what the year has been building toward. The fields and forest edges deliver simultaneously — and the work of receiving them is constant from September through November.
Korean autumn is also, arguably, the most beautiful season in the countryside. The rice paddies turn gold in September and October. The ginkgo trees along village roads go full yellow in November. The persimmon trees — left unpruned and sprawling over farmhouse walls throughout the year — suddenly become the most visually striking objects in any Korean village: heavy with bright orange fruit, glowing against clear blue autumn skies.
밤줍기 — collecting chestnuts
Bam-juuki (밤줍기) — chestnut picking — is a ritual of early autumn. Chestnuts in Korea fall from late September through October, and in villages where chestnut trees grow on the surrounding hillsides, collecting them is a daily activity during the season.
The mechanics are simple: the spiny husks split open when the nuts are ripe and fall from the tree, often overnight. Every morning during the season, people go out to collect what has fallen. The tools are a bucket and — if you are wise — thick-soled shoes. The husks are sharp. The nuts inside are worth the care.
Korean chestnuts (밤, bam) are larger and sweeter than most European varieties. They are eaten roasted, incorporated into rice dishes, used in the stuffing of the autumn holiday foods eaten at 추석 (Chuseok), and made into various confections. Street vendors in Korean cities sell paper bags of roasted chestnuts from November onward; in the countryside, those same nuts have recently fallen from trees on the village hillside.
The experience of collecting chestnuts early on an autumn morning — cool air, dew still on the ground, the sound of nuts hitting the path overnight — is one of those activities that exists in rural cultures across the temperate world. It is recognizable to a visitor from France or England or New England. But the scale and ease of it in the Korean countryside, where chestnut trees grow semi-wild on slopes that are not privately managed in the way Western woodlands often are, gives it a particular openness.
감따기 — the persimmon harvest
Gam-ttagi (감따기), harvesting persimmons, is the defining image of Korean rural autumn. The persimmon tree (감나무, gamnamu) is everywhere in the Korean countryside — in farmhouse gardens, on village roads, on hillside terraces. It is one of the most beautiful trees in any season, but in autumn it becomes spectacular: after the leaves fall, the bright orange fruit remains on the bare branches against the autumn sky.
Korean persimmons are harvested in October and November. The harvest has two main uses:
Soft persimmons (홍시, hongsi) are left to ripen fully on or off the tree until the flesh becomes completely soft and translucent, intensely sweet. Eating a fully ripe hongsi — splitting the skin with a spoon and eating the jelly-like interior in cold autumn air — is an experience with no good Western equivalent. The sweetness is deeper and less sharp than any commercially produced fruit.
Dried persimmons (곶감, gotgam) are made by peeling the unripe fruit and hanging them in rows from eaves and rafters to dry in the cold, dry autumn and early winter air. The drying process takes weeks; the surface develops a white powdery bloom of natural sugar. Gotgam is one of Korea’s most traditional preserved foods — chewy, intensely sweet, long-keeping. The sight of rows of orange persimmons hanging from the eaves of a farmhouse in November, slowly shrivelling and whitening, is one of the most distinctively Korean images of the autumn countryside.
벼 추수 — the rice harvest
September and October are rice harvest season (벼 추수, byeo chussu) across Korea’s agricultural areas.
Korean rice farming takes place in paddyfields (논, non) — flooded fields that have been managed with water through the summer growing season. In late summer, the water is drained and the stalks turn from green to gold. By September and October the fields are ready for harvest: dense stands of heavy-headed rice bending in the autumn wind, the air smelling of straw and dry earth.
In most of Korea today, the harvest is done by combine harvester — machines that cut, thresh, and bag the rice in a single pass. The combines move through the valley over a period of a few weeks; the sound and smell of them working is the soundscape of Korean rural October. In a small paddyfield village on the Boseong River, the harvest season means the roads are temporarily busy with agricultural machinery, the farmyards fill with sacks of rice, and the air has a particular richness to it.
For foreign visitors who have grown up with Western grain farming — wheat fields cut by combine in July, the stubble fields of August — Korean rice harvest has some familiar qualities and some entirely different ones. The most striking difference is often the scale and intimacy: Korean paddyfields are typically small, shaped around the contours of the valley floor, terraced up hillsides in some areas. The harvest of each paddy is a specific event. The ownership of each plot is specific and known. This is not the vast, anonymous grain agriculture of the American Midwest or the Ukrainian steppe. It is a landscape of human-scale fields managed by families who have known their specific ground for generations.
Chuseok — the harvest festival
추석 (Chuseok) falls in September or October on the fifteenth day of the eighth lunar month — Korea’s great autumn festival. It is often compared to Thanksgiving in the United States or harvest festivals in European traditions, but the comparison is imprecise.
Chuseok is primarily an ancestor memorial festival (차례, charye — a ceremony at the family graves or altar) combined with a family reunion. The entire country moves: roads and trains fill with people returning to their ancestral hometowns. In rural areas, this means villages that are quiet for much of the year suddenly fill with returned children and grandchildren. The foods prepared — songpyeon (half-moon rice cakes), jeon (fried dishes), various namul — use the autumn harvest directly. Chestnuts, rice, persimmons, and seasonal vegetables gathered in the weeks before Chuseok appear on the memorial table.
For foreign visitors who happen to be in Korea during Chuseok, the experience of rural villages during this period is unlike any other time of year. The combination of ceremony, family, food, and the particular quality of autumn light in the Korean countryside produces something that stays with people.