How to Decorate a Porch With Pumpkins

Every fall I watch the same thing happen on this street. Somebody loads up at a farm stand in late September, stacks real pumpkins along the porch steps, and by the second week of October the whole pile is soft and sagging and headed for the field behind the garage. I know because I did it for years. I have lived in this brick house in Zanesville for 24 years and I have decorated this porch every one of them, and the fall I stopped buying real pumpkins was the fall I stopped dreading the middle of October.

What sits on my porch now is the DomeStar fake pumpkin set, eight small foam pumpkins with a bag of thirty fake maple leaves. I bought mine in September last year, so this fall was its second season outside. It is a tabletop set, not a big display, and once I stopped asking it to be something bigger, the porch got easier to style and a good deal easier to put away.

Here is what I got wrong for about fifteen years. I thought decorating a porch meant buying enough pumpkins to fill it. So I bought big heavy ones and I lined them up along the top step because that is what the magazines showed. It looked fine for ten days. Then it looked tired and crowded, and hauling the soft ones out back in November was a chore I complained about every single year. A small set arranged well beats a big set dumped out. That is the whole idea, and the rest of this is how I actually do it, in the order I do it.

A word on what this set is not, because I would rather you hear it from me than find out at the door. These are small. The widest one has a five inch base and the whole set is roughly fifteen inches across when you spread it out on the table. If you want a pumpkin the size of a beach ball flanking the front door, this is not that, and you should buy one big one instead. This set is for the table, the step, the crate, the mantel. The places where a cluster of small things reads better than one heavy thing.

Step 1: Pick the Spot Before You Pick the Pumpkins

Walk out your front door and stand there for a minute. Look at what your porch already gives you, because that decides everything else. Mine has a roof over half of it and a small table to the right of the door, about knee high, and that table is where the pumpkins go. Under the roof means they stay dry, and dry means I am not out there wiping them off every time it rains.

If your porch is open to the sky, put the set somewhere a little protected anyway. The listing calls these waterproof and they may well be, but I have never tested mine in a downpour and I am not going to start now to prove a point. A covered corner, or a spot close to the door where the eave reaches, gets you through October without an experiment.

The other thing I check is wind. These are light. The whole set weighs under half a pound, so a good gust will move them. The first week mine were out loose, I found one in the flower bed by the walk. Now they go into a shallow basket, and the sides of the basket stop them from traveling. A tray works too, or a low bowl. Anything with a rim. Before I settled on the basket I tried a metal cookie sheet, thinking the lip would hold them and I would not have to buy anything. It held them fine and it looked like I was drying dishes on the porch, so that lasted two days. Keep the walking path clear while you are at it. I quit putting things on the steps themselves, because Gary and I both come in with groceries and I got tired of kicking pumpkins aside.

Step 2: Group Them in Threes and Stop Lining Them Up

Five of my eight pumpkins go on the porch table. Three go on the mantel in the living room around the candles. That split happened by accident the first year and I have kept it, because five is enough to look like a gathering and three is enough to look intentional without crowding a mantel that already has things on it.

Whatever number you land on, group them. Three together, then two together, with a gap of a few inches between the groups. A row of eight pumpkins is not a decoration, it is a receipt. Mix the sizes inside each group too. The DomeStar set gives you different sizes and shapes, and if you put all the little ones on one end and all the bigger ones on the other, it reads like you sorted them by size. Put a bigger one in the middle and let the smaller ones lean in around it. That is how they would sit if you set them down without thinking, which is exactly the look worth having.

I did it the wrong way first, in a row along the top step, evenly spaced, the way you would set out tomatoes at a table. Gary walked past it twice without a word, which is how I knew something was off. When I finally asked, he said it looked like a store display waiting to be priced, and he was right. Two evenings later I brought out a basket and shoved them together and the porch started looking like a porch.

Leave one or two turned slightly away from the door. Facing every single pumpkin forward makes the group look like it is waiting for a photograph. Two turned ones make it look like they landed there.

Step 3: Change the Height So the Eye Has Somewhere to Go

A flat porch is dull no matter what you put on it, and the fix is not more pumpkins. It is one thing at a different level. On my table the basket sits flat, and then one pumpkin rides on a small stack of two so it sits higher than the rest. Beside the table I keep an old wooden crate turned on its end, and one pumpkin sits on top of that.

You probably own the height already. A crate, a stump, a bench, an overturned pot, a chair you were going to get rid of. Set one pumpkin on it and let everything else stay low. One raised spot pulls the whole arrangement together and it costs nothing but a trip to the basement.

My crate came home from an auction with Gary about a dozen years ago and has been holding paint cans in the basement ever since. It is unpainted, one slat is a little loose, and it does exactly what a raised spot needs to do. I have thought about painting it three falls running and I have not, and now I probably will not, because the rough wood is the part I like.

Do not raise everything, though. If the basket is up and the crate is up and the step is up, you are back to flat, just at a higher altitude. One high point, the rest low.

Step 4: Fill the Bare Spots With Leaves, Then Stop

Thirty leaves come in the set and I use most of them. They go in the gaps between pumpkins, tucked under the basket edge, and a few on the table itself where the wood shows through. Leaves are what make a group of small objects look like a scene instead of a purchase.

Two rules for the leaves. Keep them low, and do not scatter them past the edge of the table. I tried running leaves down the steps one year and by the end of the week they were in the yard and in the gutter and I was out there in the rain picking them up.

Then add one thing that is not in the set, because a set used exactly as packaged looks like a set. For me it is a small lantern on the crate and a pot of mums on the top step. For you it might be a doormat, a sign, a bit of bittersweet from the fence row. One thing. Not five. The pumpkins should still be the first thing a person notices when they come up the walk.

Step 5: Pack It So Next September Takes Ten Minutes

This is the step nobody writes about and it is the one that decides whether you use the set again or leave it in a bin for six years. When I had real pumpkins, November meant a wheelbarrow and a bad mood. Now it means carrying a basket down to the basement.

The pumpkins and the leaves go back in the same shallow basket they sat in on the porch, and the basket goes on the shelf in the unfinished basement where the fall things live. The leaves go in loose, not in a bag, and two falls in I have not lost one that I noticed. That is the whole job. No bag to hunt for, no box to tape shut. The basket is the storage. If you would rather bag them, use a clear zipper bag and write on it. I have a shelf of unlabeled bins and every September I open four of them before I find what I want, and a strip of masking tape with two words on it ends that conversation with myself. I keep the roll in the drawer by the basement stairs now so there is no excuse.

Wipe them with a damp cloth before they go down and again when they come up. The set cleans up easily, which is more than I can say for the real ones. Foam collects dust on a basement shelf, and a dusty pumpkin on a swept porch looks worse than no pumpkin at all.

What Else Helps

Sweep first. I know that sounds like a mother talking, but a swept porch with three pumpkins on it looks better than a leaf covered porch with eight. Ten minutes with a broom does more for the front of your house than another trip to the store, and it is free.

Light matters more than people give it credit for. The porch light on, a candle in a lantern, and the whole thing reads warm from the street even before anyone gets close enough to see what it is. Three of my pumpkins came inside to the mantel around the flameless candles I keep there, and three small pumpkins in candlelight look like a good deal more than three.

And give it a rest. I put the fall things out the last week of September and they stay until the weekend after Thanksgiving, when the Christmas boxes come up the stairs. Five or six weeks is about right for a pumpkin on a porch. Any longer than that and you stop seeing it, and so does everybody walking past.

Five pumpkins on the porch table, three on the mantel, thirty leaves split between them. That is the entire display, it fits in one basket, and it still looks right on Thanksgiving morning.