Thanksgiving decorations from your garden

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Thanksgiving Decorations Although Thanksgiving has become a time to share a meal with family members and watch sporting events on television, it was originally a time to celebrate the harvest season. This meant enjoying the fruits of labor from an entire season of growing and caring for vegetable plants. Enjoying that season now might mean acquiring vegetables from a garden that has been growing all season, but it can also mean using those natural resources to make your home and lawn more festive during the Thanksgiving holiday.

One of the most popular and well-known ways to decorate for Thanksgiving from your garden is to spend the summer and early fall months planting and growing vine vegetables like pumpkins, gourds or squash. There are a variety of different sizes of pumpkins, from large vine pumpkins to mini pumpkins, as well as bush and semi-bush varieties.

In order for Thanksgiving pumpkins, gourds and squash to make it to harvest right before the November holiday, gardeners should wait to plant them until the end of June or the beginning of July. Pumpkins, squash and gourds are great in combination for displays on the lawn, front steps, or surrounding the driveway, as well as in the house on counters, coffee tables or as a centerpiece.

Decorating with Cornstalks

Another great way to make [Thanksgiving decorations] from your garden is to use cornstalks that would otherwise be chopped down. The brown cornstalks are a reminder of the reason for Thanksgiving and are also a great way to decorate a lamppost or post that supports an awning in the front yard. These can easily be tied with twine that was used earlier in the season for staking tomatoes. Keep in mind that if you want to consider using cornstalks for your Thanksgiving display, you should leave them in the ground as long as possible. This will slow down the decomposing process.

Depending on your climate zone, you may be able to use actual corn as part of your Thanksgiving display. Of course the tradition is to display Indian corn, but any type of corn husks you still have remaining in your garden will work. Corn husks work well displayed in combination with gourds or pumpkins or even in a cornucopia.

While vegetables usually dominate the Thanksgiving decorations in many homes, fruit was actually an important part of the original harvest season as well. If you are a gardener who has an orchard or grows fruit plants, display these during the Thanksgiving season as well. Fruit works great in a cornucopia or also in a simple fruit bowl on the counter. It can also be placed on a hay stack in the garden outside of the house in replacement of annuals that have died. Excellent fruit choices are grapes, apples, oranges, or even pears. Remember that fruit decomposes more quickly than vegetables so should only be placed out for decoration a short time before the Thanksgiving holiday.

Put those tree leaves to use

Although leaves don’t come from your garden, they are a fall gardening item that will need to be picked up and removed from the yard and from the garden beds during the fall months. So, why not use these beautiful fall colored leaves to display as Thanksgiving decoration?

They can be gathered up to place on top of a hay stack or around a lamp post that has a cornstalk tied to it. Fall colored leaves also work great for indoor Thanksgiving displays, although leaves will begin to decompose more quickly with the warm indoor temperatures. If you want to keep fall leaves indoors for longer, try pressing them in wax paper and cutting around the edges of the leaf. From here they can be placed on counter tops, hung on the walls or even used in Thanksgiving craft projects.

There are endless natural ways to add color and life to your Thanksgiving decorations. The beauty of the Thanksgiving holiday is to enjoy the harvest season, and nothing goes better with that than decorations from our natural surroundings.