The Pumpkin Gate, a retrospective guide.

I guess some pics of what I have always called ‘the fence’ have been getting passed around Pinterest lately, and I’ve fielded a few emails on how it is done. Indeed, it’s one of the things that garners many comments from the people in the neighborhood as well.

I don’t know that I’d go so far as to make a step by step how-to, but it’s a good time to take a little retrospective journey on what has been called “the pumpkin gate”.

Now, don’t laugh…the gate was truly originally created in 2007, and they aren’t the best, I know. At the time, I wanted a totem made of pumpkin faces, and we made an elaborate paper mache and monster mud set of towers to serve as “the entrance”.

From An UnOrthOdOx Halloween

See, I’ve always considered the front yard to be a transition, a staircase scene. Moving from the ordinary into my world. The gate, therefore has always been the “entrance” in my mind, despite the fact that the bridge serves the traditional view of the word.

The Totems would serve this purpose for several years, marking that barrier, in my mind at least, where people stepped across the threshold.

From Halloween 07

Between heavy rain on Halloween 2009, and a couple storms that destroyed pretty much everything I had for the yard in summer of 2010, Halloween 2010 was looking like a very bad year. But, spurred by some people who were calling a “Harvest” theme boring, “People just put up nothing but some pumpkins and corn stalks and call it good”. I was bound and determined that by damn, I was going to make nothing but corn stalks and pumpkins cool. I think my remaining decorating budget for 2010 was all of $100. Of that, $60 went to buying pumpkins (of which I got about 70!), and the rest to various lights and such. What transpired has been our basis ever since.

From The Harvest

And, the foundation for the pumpkin gate was set in 2010. Not in it’s present form, but the seeds. I had gotten the idea of a pumpkin creeper from Skull and Bones in my head (sadly, the site is no longer around or I’d link here), and while I had seen several versions made out of mache or foam or other, I had known of no one that had tried to make one out of real pumpkins, so I did. Initial tests on bifurcating pumpkins showed promising results.

From 2010 Buildup

So, with no budget, and wanting to make some creeper monsters, I turned to scrap EMT, and bent them into little forms. These weren’t the big stalking creepers others had built, but with a couple well placed limbs little crawling creepers were born in 2010.

From The Harvest

From The Harvest

It was almost an afterthought in 2011 to take those creeper forms and wire them to the fence.

From 2011 buildup

From 2011 buildup

Testing it out early 2011, in the dark, in a rush, some random car driving by just as I hit the switch and turned them on shouted “that is so awesome”.

From 2011 buildup

Today, the conduit is basically a permanent addition to the fence, just waiting to receive new pumpkins.

From Buildup 14

From Buildup 14

C7 lights are used to light our bifurcated pumpkins, a hole drilled into the back to fit both the lights and the pumpkin. The pumpkins are simply balanced on those conduit, and the pipe shoved from the back all the way into the wall of the pumpkin on the other side.

I’ve found the best way to utilize the fence is to fill the chain link with filling so the gate becomes something of a visual barrier as well. The bright pumpkin light bathing the front, with darkness beyond. I end up using our Raven grass, the same that makes the arch (and lets me run power up over the walking path safely), just the leaves and ones too small for the actual arch.

When coupled with the corn tunnel, which prevents light pollution from the sides, it became my favorite entrance to date. That darkness just beyond is really NOT as dark as it appears from the outside, but this was the tripping point for many little ones NOT ready to take that step over the threshold.

From Halloween 2013

Corn and pumpkins…”boring”.