UNLIKE MANY REGIONS of our country, our September does not lose the heat or the humidity of summer. Just the same, the intensity of the sun has lessened, so many farmers have added crops that are now beginning to peek above fresh furrows. This third crop of the year for the same field is one of the reasons Charleston became the self-proclaimed chutney capital. Captains running rice, cotton and indigo to markets in England and Europe sailed the trades. From European ports, following fair winds, their routes took them to South Africa, India, then back around the Cape, up the west coast of Africa and finally across the Atlantic to Jamaica and on to the Carolinas. It is how the first grains of Carolina Gold rice came to this coastal colony. It was a ship’s captain giving seed he had collected in Madagascar, in exchange for needed repairs. Chutneys could have happened in any of the frequented ports, but South Carolina just happened to be such a temperate clime. Further south and a hot sun had scorched the land by late spring, while north in Virginia just when Charleston’s second and sometimes third crop was coming in, their northern neighbor was getting its first dusting of snow. Pears are the last fruits of a Lowcountry year, so southerners make the most of the crop by sealing the memory of the big canning season with a medley of things “pear.”