By Michael Jenkins
October is here, and we’re in spooky season! With Halloween coming up at the end of the month, many of us are enjoying cool fall weather, scary movies, and the chance to decorate our homes and gardens accordingly. While decorating for the season is always fun, we at Gardzen always like to think about the gardening season to come. Towards that end, we’ve been collecting seasonal decoration ideas that you can also reuse in your garden later on. So while you’re getting your house ready for the autumn season and setting up your Halloween decorations, here are some ideas for fall décor for your garden and how you can reuse them later.
Straw bales or hay bales are an iconic image of the fall season, and they add a wonderful touch to your outdoor space decoration. Straw bales are relatively affordable at many farm supply and garden supply stores at this time of the year, and they can be used in a number of ways around home and garden. They add a great three-dimensional aspect to your décor, and when arranged artfully with a few colorful touches on or around them, they can really liven up your space. As a bonus, if you buy untreated/unpainted straw bales or hay bales, you can reuse them in the garden later! Straw and hay can be composted, mixed into soil to lighten it up, or used as mulch. They can even be used to grow potatoes and other vegetables—but that’s another article, so stay tuned!
Decorative gourds and pumpkins are another fall décor staple, and there are many ways in which they can be reused in your garden over the seasons to come. As a decoration, they look great on your front steps, on your porch, or placed in a window—gourds and pumpkins of different shapes can be stacked and arranged in all sorts of ways. They can be carved into the classic Halloween jack-o-lantern, a project that offers endless possibilities for creativity and can be fun to do with children. Combined with your hay bales, they really offer a wonderful fall vibe in any outdoor space. When their decorative use comes to an end, they can be reused in your compost. They are a great treat to feed outdoor animals like livestock or chickens, or if you live in a more rural area they can be left in the woods to feed the deer. For any animal feed use, it helps to smash gourds and pumpkins up a bit first to expose their soft, tasty interiors. If you’d like to try a gardening project, you can save seeds and try to grow your own next year!
Many farmers and gardeners have an ample supply of corn stalks around right now, and they can be used to add some fall flavor to your decorations. Tied together upright in a bunch, they can be used to evoke fall haystacks and corn harvesting while adding an upright element to your décor. Such uprights can be festooned with outdoor lights for some color and excitement on your front lawn. As with hay bales, they can be reused later as mulch, a soil amendment, or in the compost heap!
The joy of gardening never ends, and at Gardzen we view fall and winter as wonderful opportunities to enhance your garden and plan for the spring to come. We hope our fall garden décor ideas help you both decorate your garden and get ready for the planting season. Until then, enjoy the cool weather and the wonderful autumn days ahead!
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