Nothing speaks fall more than colorful mums, pumpkins, and corn shocks. To add a touch of the season to your home, spruce up your curb appeal, and welcome your friends with the warmth of the season, consider a few of these fall porch ideas for your home.
7 Festive Fall Porch Decorating Ideas
1. Natural Arrangements
Just because the flowers of spring and summer have quit blooming doesn’t mean you can’t have stunning displays flanking your front door. Create sentinel arrangements using large urns filled with dried branches or grasses with the seed heads on top.
Add a pop of color with the deep hues of pokeberry, autumn olive, or staghorn sumac. Fill in with colorful leaves and long sprays of goldenrod.
2. Fun and Country
Your children will love helping to decorate the porch when it involves carving jack-o-lanterns and traipsing through the cornfield gathering dried shocks. Tie the shocks to your porch pillars using orange and black plaid ribbon.
Give your jack-o-lanterns flowering hair with a mum insert. Or, set your mums on bales of straw on either side of the porch. For a spooky touch, hang spider webbing from the eaves. And, for added fall color, introduce throw pillows on your porch rocker or other seating.
3. Get Cozy
If you’re lucky enough to have a long, deep porch with rockers and a swing, make it a cozy place to gather by incorporating just a few touches. A fuzzy throw over the back of a rocker or swing seat and a few fall-patterned pillows will make drinking your morning coffee more comfortable.
An area rug keeps your toes off the dew-covered floor. An area rug keeps your toes off the dew-covered floor, and cinnamon-scented candles create a warm, glowing ambiance. If you don’t have one already, add a small table. It provides the perfect place to rest that serving tray of hot cocoa.
4. Pumpkins, Of Course!
Pumpkins, the country’s favorite cucurbits, come in more colors than orange. For a contemporary home, consider white pumpkins. They go with every color scheme. Or, did you know that pumpkins also come in blue, green, yellow, and tan—and some even with stripes?
From extra-large to mini, they can be found in a variety of sizes and shapes, too. Don’t dis the pumpkin because orange isn’t your favorite color. Visit your local nursery to discover all the possibilities.
5. A Pumpkin Topiary
Pumpkin topiaries make the perfect addition to your front entry. To create a pair of your own, you’ll need two large planters filled with pea gravel, six pumpkins, a long dowel rod, and some dry grasses.
Choose two large pumpkins that will cover the top of the planters, two medium-sized pumpkins, and two small ones. Remove the stems from the four larger pumpkins and drill holes through the center of each one.
Drill a hole halfway into the bottom of the two small ones but not all the way through. Sink the dowel rod into the center of the gravel in each planter. Thread the largest pumpkins onto the rods, then the medium-sized ones, then top with the smaller ones. Work some of the dry grass in between the pumpkins.
6. Mums!
Don’t just plop a mum on each porch step and call it done. Dress them up with decorative planters. You may already have some around the house to use. And no worries if you don’t have six of the same—variety is the spice of life. Consider using a pickle crock, an old washtub, a half-bushel basket, or an old apple crate. Accessorize the mums with a few mini pumpkins or gourds and your porch steps will be the envy of your neighbors.
7. Lights Aglow
If you’re having a harvest party, you’ll need outdoor lighting around your porch area. Adding candles to your jack-o-lanterns is nice, but how about lining your walk with mini-pumpkins carved out to hold tea lights?
If the open flames make you nervous, hide strings of twinkle lights throughout the mums on your porch steps instead, or hang Edison lights from the porch ceiling. And, add pillar candles to a few lanterns to shed some light in the corners.
You can adapt these fall porch ideas for a deck, and if you have a stoop or a balcony, they’ll work well there too. Just remember color and cozy will turn any space into the warm, inviting area fall demands.