The One Thing Illinois Residents Should Never Do With Old Pumpkins

As we all get ready to say goodbye to Halloween and hello to the holiday season, there's one very important thing to remember when you're getting rid of old pumpkins.

Best Ways to Get Rid Of Old Pumpkins

One of the things I love to do most during the fall season is to decorate my home with pumpkins that I leave out through Thanksgiving, and this year we had a very successful pumpkin growing season in our little backyard garden patch...

My family was excited to have grown over 25 pumpkins to decorate with and carve this Halloween season, but soon we'll have to get rid of all those pumpkins...so, what's the best way to do that?

Let's start with the one thing you definitely SHOULD NOT do with all your old pumpkins...throw them in the trash!

Yes, pumpkins decompose pretty quickly, but they still fill up landfills which is never a good thing. Luckily, there are several ways you can get rid of old pumpkins AND give them another worthwhile purpose.

Use Old Pumpkins to Fertilize Your Garden

You see all those pumpkins we grew in the picture above? Would you believe me if I told you we only planted 6 seeds that we saved from pumpkins we carved last Halloween?

Those six seeds gave us large pumpkins to carve this year, BUT how did we get the other pumpkin varieties you see in the picture? That answer is simple...we tossed last fall's pumpkins into our garden patch and let them decompose there all winter long.

We literally took every gourd, decorative pumpkin, and carved pumpkin we had last year and just threw them over the edge of our deck...that's it! They provided the perfect fertilizer for our garden patch, and definitely helped everything else we planted in the garden this spring too. Give a try this year...you'll be amazed!

Use Old Pumpkins to Feed Wildlife

In case you didn't know, all sorts of wildlife love to eat pumpkins, carved or whole, so just gather up your old pumpkins and find a field or forest to toss them in. (Just make sure you smash them so no animals get their heads stuck inside them!)

FYI, many farms, zoos, or wildlife sanctuaries will take old pumpkins to feed their animals a special treat too.

If you need one more reason to convince you not to throw old pumpkins in the trash this year, just read this fact about pumpkin pollution;

When pumpkins rot, they produce methane, which is a greenhouse gas that is 25 percent more potent than carbon dioxide, which is extremely harmful to the environment and contributes to climate change.

Basically, a handful of rotting pumpkins in your backyard isn't a big problem, but hundreds of thousands of them in one landfill certainly is. Please remember that.