How To: Fall Pumpkin Planters

Today we're excited to share one of the fall pumpkin decorating projects we've taken on this season — making live planters out of carved pumpkins!

When Sherry & John of Young House Love and Katie of Bower Power announced it was that time again for the Fall Pinterest Challenge, we knew exactly the project we'd tackle this go round — it's been on our list of decorating ideas we wanted to try and the season is beginning to slip away from us! It couldn't have been a better kick in the pants to get 'er done.

The Pinterest Challenges are simply self imposed challenges to make or do something inspired by the pins on your Pinterest boards — the project can be anything and anyone can participate.

Image from Young House Love

You might recall we tackled making DIY bean teepees for our pea plants during the Winter Pinterest Challenge and underwent a total under the kitchen sink transformation for the Summer Pinterest Challenge.

Here are the pumpkin planter project ideas and inspiration images we'd been pinning to get our creative juices flowing:

Image pinned from Jonna and the original project idea can be found here, at Better Homes and Gardens (3rd image in the slideshow).

1. Image pinned from Lisa and the original project idea can be fond here, on Martha Stewart (#61 in slideshow). 2. While flipping around in that same Martha Stewart slideshow, I came across this related image (#40 in slideshow) and pinned it for this project too.

We'd already gotten our pumpkins this year and had a few bright yellow mums in the planters we snagged at a neighborhood yard sale earlier this month all hanging out on our front stairs to "fall" things up a bit. Guess who can't stand it when we go out front to take photos and he isn't allowed to follow?

 

While we loved the autumn look the plants and pumpkins were bringing to the front of the house, we definitely wanted to take it up a notch with the pumpkin planter idea, so we picked up 2 more colorful mum plants and brought the pumpkins inside to get started!

After wiping the excess dirt off the pumpkins, I just carefully cut a wide circle around the top edge of the pumpkin and removed the top. I cut wider than with a regular jack-o-lantern since we'd be putting live plants in the pumpkin and I wanted lots of room to add fill dirt and let those plants get happy in their new home.

I set the smallest of the 3 pumpkins aside to tackle for our jack-o-lantern (details coming tomorrow) and started roughly scooping out all the seeds and other insides from the larger 2 we'd be making the planters out of. 

Side Note: We always like to save the seeds from pumpkin carving to make and enjoy roasted pumpkin seeds the last week of October — it's such a fun tradition. We use this recipe and method for roasting them.

I didn't worry too much about scraping the insides of the pumpkin perfectly since they wouldn't be carved further and we'd be filling them with dirt. So after removing the tops and a quick clean of the insides, we were ready to bring these guys outside to get them planted.

First, we flipped them over and drilled 4 holes straight through the bottom of each pumpkin to allow for drainage. Since these will be living plants in a natural planter, we wanted to try to do everything we could to help extend their growing time. Mr. Curious was on site to inspect each hole:

 

Then we flipped them back over and filled in a shovel full of dirt into the base of each pumpkin:

 

Once the dirt was in and we'd tested the fit of the flower plants, we were able to slide them down into the pumpkins and fill in dirt around the remaining empty areas inside and near the top of the pumpkins: 

With a quick wipe down and healthy watering, we were ready to call our planters complete!

After making the planters, it was just a matter of fussing around with their placement on the front stairs to achieve that "autumn bounty but perfectly balanced" look you always see done so well in the seasonal versions of magazines, haha:

I'm not confident we pulled off the placement like the masters do, but we're in love with how our little pumpkin mum planters turned out:

Basil's been keeping a watchful eye on them:

Please ignore all those doggie nose prints on the glass — it's a constant losing battle on our part.

We even brought the pumpkin planters back inside for a little while to fuss around with a centerpiece:

I just brought the tall glass cylinder vase full of branches we keep in our front entry back to the middle of the dining table and placed each pumpkin planter on either side of it. Then I brought all those little baby pumpkins we had around the house back there to toss in the mix too!

We thought a big statement centerpiece like this could make for a fun party table throughout the fall into Thanksgiving.

Discover More:

* More DIY Projects | All Gardening Projects *

So that's the story of our pumpkin planters! Also, if you haven't, take a moment to check out all the other great projects shaping up across the blog world today spurred by this Pinterest Challenge — great places to start are with Young House Love & Bower Power.

Image from Young House Love

The other guest hosts this season are Sarah of Ugly Duckling House and Carmel of Our Fifth House. We've already discovered so many inspiring projects and new-to-us blogs to add to our own readers. If you joined in the challenge this season, we'd love to see what you were inspired to take on as well!