While October means things like breast cancer awareness, shopping for Halloween costumes, and pumpkin spice everything, it also means decorating for Fall.

Whether you’re decorating for Halloween or Fall in general, we love the look of classic pumpkins and jack-o-lanterns. The only problem is that real pumpkins only last for weeks, and if you carve them into jack-o-lanterns, they only last for days.

Recently, we discovered an easy way to decorate for Fall that gives us the pumpkin look we love without dealing with rotten pumpkins sooner than we’d like. The secret: use plastic pumpkin pails that you can pick up at Walmart for just $1 each. Yes, we’re talking about the pumpkin pails that have a jack-o-lantern face on one side, the same ones kids traditionally take with them on Halloween to collect their candy while trick-or-treating.

We love how Hometalker Alicia uses these pumpkin pails to decorate her front porch. Not only is her Fall front porch display beautiful, but it looks really easy to replicate.

Alicia starts by filling a big pot with potting soil. Then she inserts a 4’ piece of rebar. She cuts the handles off of the plastic pumpkin pails and drills a hole that is big enough for the rebar to fit through in the bottom of each plastic pail.

The decorating project really starts to come together when she inserts the rebar into the first plastic pumpkin, fills the pumpkin with potting soil and plants seasonal mums inside.

We absolutely love this idea of using these plastic pumpkins as planters, but Alicia takes it a step further to make a very impressive-looking topiary. She even has a super easy idea for how to switch her display from a Halloween display to a Fall display that would be perfect for the entire season and could definitely last until you’re ready to decorate for Christmas.

You can see all the details about this easy, inexpensive and beautiful front porch decorating idea in the video below.

This is certainly a great unconventional way to use plastic pumpkin pails, and the Fall look where the jack-o-lantern face is pointed towards the house would be a great way to upcycle your kids’ plastic pumpkin pails after they’re home from trick-or-treating.

While Alicia uses 5 pumpkins in each of her topiaries, you could use more or less depending on how high you want the topiary to be, and while she has 2 of these topiaries on her front porch, you could have just one if your porch is small or 3 or more if you have a bigger area to decorate.

Have you already decorated your front porch for Fall? Are you going to try this topiary idea?