When it comes to fall decor, the front porch is my favorite place to start. I love the instantly-cozy vibe that it brings to our home and that I get to share the cheerful harvest spirit with everyone passing by our house at that time of year.
Fall decor is something a lot of us autumn lovers get excited about and it’s especially fun to decorate the outside of your house, whether that’s a porch, patio, or stoop, to spread the fall cheer to everyone in your community. I love that our small town does such a great job of decorating for fall and I always find everyone’s displays so unique and so interesting, yet they’re often pulled together from a lot of similar elements. I always get so many fall decorating ideas just from driving or walking around our small town.
Since we’re in a rural area, we have easy access to lots of pumpkins, straw bales, and corn stalks at farm stands throughout the area and it just makes the whole process so fun and rewarding. There are countless ways to decorate with mums, sunflowers, and jack o’ lanterns in different colors, shapes, and sizes, and getting the combination just right can produce a stunning display. Fall is a busy time, though, for a lot of us, so today I’m sharing ideas that will let you take part in the joy of decorating for autumn without taking up too much of your precious time.
Where to Find Fall Decor Supplies for Your Front Porch
I love to use natural items in my fall decorations whenever possible. Using locally-grown decor is excellent because it’s environmentally friendly and it’s compostable when you’re done with it, so it doesn’t take up any storage space in your basement throughout the rest of the year. If you live in an agricultural area like I do, you’ll be thankful to find farm stands and farmer’s markets where people are selling pumpkins, cornstalks, mums, bales of straw, and everything for your fall embellishment needs for a very reasonable price. If you don’t have access to these amenities where you live, you’ll probably see these items for sale outside your local grocery store during the months of September and October, or you may want to check your local garden centre as well when it’s time to decorate for fall.
One fun idea would be to visit your local urban farmer’s market during the fall. You’ll almost definitely find someone from a nearby farm selling these autumn decor staples at this time of year and their colorful displays of natural elements may be enough to inspire you to get started on your fall decoration endeavors.
If you have a bit of garden space in your own yard, you might want to consider growing some of your own fall colors. If you have a little vegetable garden, you can dry corn stalks leftover after harvest to make your own corn bundles, learn how to plant sunflower seeds for your own sunflowers to display inside and outside your home, and even look into growing pumpkins in your own pumpkin patch.
My Easiest Front Porch Decor Ideas
When it comes to fall decor for my front porch, one thing that you can count on every year is that I’ll probably spend no more than 20-30 minutes on it after I’ve gathered up all my foliage and autumnal supplies. I find I’m so busy getting into the school-year swing of things during September every year that I usually feel like this is the year that I just won’t have time to do anything. But then, one day, after seeing a few other porches starting to be decorated around town, I get hit with a burst of inspiration, and I convince myself to just do a little something. What I find every single time is that once I get started, the whole thing takes almost no time or effort at all, even if it looks like I spent a whole day putting my fall porch decor in place. Here are some of my favorite front porch fall decor ideas from the last few years. Feel free to copy anything that you think you’d like to try on your own porch! 🙂
Classic and Colorful Fall Porch Decor | As autumn rolled in the first year that we had our front porch, I accented my entryway with all the charming symbols of the season. I decided to elevate my decor with a fun combination of orange pumpkins and happy mums in a rich, vibrant shade of dark pinky red. I couldn’t resist adding one of my favorite blue and white ceramic planters to the mix. The end result is a joyful and eye-catching display perfect for early fall right through to Thanksgiving.
Neutral and Natural Autumn Porch | To achieve a unique look on my side porch one year, I opted for a neutral theme using dry hydrangeas, dried corn stalks tied with twine, green and white pumpkins, and red-orange fall leaves scattered about. The combination resulted in an inviting, serene, and tranquil atmosphere that fully embraces the beauty of autumn. Ornamental wheat stems and a crafty autumn hydrangea wreath adds another of layer texture to the leafy display.
Front Porch Decorated With White Mums and Green Pumpkins | I loved this neutral look on the front porch with all the white mums and pumpkins! It’s a little bit trendy, like something straight out of a Pinterest board, but still classic with the pops of bright orange, which made my porch feel ready for the Halloween season as well as early fall. We usually keep our porch pumpkins up throughout the entire season and bring in a few more of our favorite festive gourd when it’s time for pumpkin carving. The woven basket I used as a planter in this porch display layers in a few more much-needed textures since I chose to leave the front door without a wreath.
Orange Pumpkins and Rustic Galvanized Metal | A Classic fall decor look that’s, of course, the kids’ favorite. Fun fact: These pumpkins and squash were all grown in our garden! As you can see, we had a lot of just piled them up everywhere, even inside a lantern, for a porch bursting with fall color. The large wreath on the front door was made using burlap ribbon. All this porch needs a few candy-corn-inspired accents, and it will be ready for Halloween.
Minimal Autumn Porch With Blue-Green Pumpkins and Reused Summer Planters | I couldn’t stand the idea of getting rid of my summer planters this year. When this photo was taken, it was well into the fall season, and everything still looked so beautiful, so I just decided to incorporate the ferns, ivy, and lavender right into my fall porch decor. I love how the frosty green of the lavender works so well with the blue-green pumpkins. This is an idea I’ll definitely be making use of again because I feel like it really represents the fall season where we live, and it’s a little nod to my summer gardening, which I love so much. Just a reminder that there really are no rules when it comes to how you decorate your home for the seasons, and there’s an elegance to keeping things simple.
Oversized Pumpkin Planter for Fall | This was one clever and affordable little white pumpkin idea that worked so well. If you want to do something really impactful on your porch without spending a lot of money, fill a giant planter with a smaller mum and a few extra white baby boo pumpkins. Mums are definitely some of my favorite fall flowers, but buying a porch full of mums every fall can get expensive, so this is a great solution. Visit the link to read more about how I made it work and the filler I used.
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Courtenay Hartford is the author of creeklinehouse.com, a blog based on her adventures renovating a 120-year-old farmhouse in rural Ontario, Canada. On her blog, Courtenay shares interior design tips based on her own farmhouse and her work as founder and stylist of the interior photography firm Art & Spaces. She also writes about her farmhouse garden, plant-based recipes, family travel, and homekeeping best practices. Courtenay is the author of the book The Cleaning Ninja and has been featured in numerous magazines including Country Sampler Farmhouse Style, Better Homes and Gardens, Parents Magazine, Real Simple, and Our Homes.