All Hallows’ Horticulture Party
Mad science but make it botany. In an effort to limit new purchases again for Halloween 2023, we leaned into what’s natural at the farmhaunt anyways-plants. From a pollinator garden to a vegetable plot to indoor tropicals, we have a lot of chlorophyll-filled friends here year round. As spooky season rolled around, those friends converted to foes with a house given over to decay, carnivorous plants, and creepy crawlies heralding decomposition to build a Halloween celebration where it was easy being green.
The invitation
For the invitation, Heather used a piece of aged paper to write out the party theme and date then slid it between the pages of an old medical book. Chris then created a stop motion style video where the book floats off the shelf, flips open, and is encircled by vines before zooming into the details. We still love a handmade invitation, but it’s time consuming to make the quantities needed. In recent years, we’ve shifted to videos that blend our homemade style with the digital age.
The décor
Mossy Bones
To create a sense that nature was overtaking the space, we pulled skulls and skeletons from our boxes of Halloween props and gave them makeovers with moss and thrifted silk florals.
Image 1: We rummaged in our shed to create a pike of skulls using an old planter, spray foam, Christmas lights, and a bamboo garden stake as the base for the prop. We drilled holes in some plastic skulls then glued moss on them to cover the gaps.
Image 2: We selected our skeleton, Rickey, for a makeover this year. After a camo spray paint job, we glued on mosses and thrifted silk florals to showcase nature’s beauty springing forth from the macabre.
Image 3: We reused a mirror frame from a previous party to create a skull art with some plastic skulls and mosses.
Green Lighting
To drench the house in green, we changed out the interior and exterior fixtures with green bulbs and used LED spotlights to illuminate certain props. Green lights are also used to recognize veterans in November so these could be reused for a different purpose post-Halloween holiday.
Creepy Crawlies
One of our favorite Halloween props to use is those little bags of plastic snakes, eyeballs, bats, bugs, and bones. They are inexpensive, easy to store, and can be used in a multitude of party themes to build detail into a scene. It feels like the cute animatronic mirrors and cauldrons on the market get lost in the expansiveness of the house whereas covering the regular furniture with these elements extends the spooky scene through the entire space. We added snakes, bats, and bones into all of our house plant pots to creepify them. We also filled jars with green dyed water and filled them with plastic bugs for specimen jars.
Labware
We used the glass pieces from our mad science collection to add cuttings of plants to look like experiments in progress by the mad botanist. We often “shop our house” and move shelves from closets to common areas to create scenes without purchasing new pieces.
Carnivorous Plants
Image 1: For the windows, we used cardboard boxes to cut out vines and plant shapes, painted them black, and taped them to the windows with green light behind them to show the outline.
Image 2: A nod to Little Shop of Horrors, we made a quick papier-mache Venus fly trap (an NC native plant!). We shopped our shed to locate an old trashcan and a piece of PVC to make a planter for it. It was then covered in thrifted floral leaves.
Image 3: We painted faux apples with puff paint in a poison apple style and tied them to the branches of our indoor lemon tree.
Vines
On the exterior, we twisted real vines around the porch posts and scattered more through the graveyard. We’ve use the same foam headstones every year for a decade now, but we try to add a different touch to match the annual party theme. The vines we used were invasive English ivy that is trying to consume a tulip tree behind the house (talk about scary!), so this decorative element doubled as an invasive plant removal project.
Inside, we do a mural each year to transform the central room by hanging sheets of paper on the wall. This year was a vine-themed wall with bugs stamped onto it. It was incredibly time consuming, but our cat, Zeus, died at the beginning of October and it was a good mindful activity to navigate through the grief.
For interior vines, we twisted brown packing paper then wrapped it in silk ivy borrowed from a friend who had a forest themed party. The paper gave the thin greenery more heft for bigger impact. Sharing is another great way to reduce wasteful new purchases.
The Music
The Menu
For the food, we wanted an all green menu to stay on theme. We built a grazing table where we lined the middle with a pesto stuffed bread to look like vines, sprinkled baked spinach tortilla leaves all over, and then added in cheeses, pickled vegetables, and fruits for nibbling.
Breads: pesto stuffed twists, spinach buns with black sesame seeds, leaf shaped spinach tortilla chips
Fruits: green apple slices, green grapes, pear slices
Pickled vegetables: green olives, okra, asparagus, green beans, cornichons
Cheese: herb marinated mozzarella shaped into brains, herb crusted goat cheese, flower petal coated alpine cheese
Other elements: pistachios, green goddess dip, stuffed grape leaves
Desserts: potted cake pop monsters, graveyard pudding, lime jellied brain
Drinks: glittery sour apple martini, bubbling cauldron of green apple sodas, melon punch, grasshopper shots
