Fall Décor Tips Using Yard Trimmings

Let nature inspire your fall décor. This is the season of harvest baskets, candlelight, shiny red apples, and foliage in every hue. The first cozy fire of the season brings out the nesting instinct in everyone, but there is much to enjoy outdoors.

Grab your pruners and loppers and head out to your garden, where you'll find lots of fall decorating ideas. Pinecones always capture the spirit of the season. But if you don't have any of those in your yard, twigs, boughs and other garden trimmings let you bring a fall shapes and colors indoors, to display around your home.

Loppers are great garden tools all year round, and the PowergGear2™ Lopper (18") is one of the handiest of all. It is compact, but cuts easily through branches up to 1 ½ inches in diameter. That means you can use it to prune rose bushes, lilacs, forsythia, hydrangeas, viburnums, and small tree branches. Beyond pruning, you can use it to remove branches that have broken, that cross each other, or that are growing too close to the front walk or driveway.

Decorative Pinecone Basket
1. For indoor fall décor, prune pine trees now to gather pinecones while they're still on the limb in attractive clusters. The coated blades of the PowerGear2™ loppers glide through pine branches without getting sticky.

2. After you have lopped branches where necessary, use the PowerGear2™Pruners to cut some pinecone clusters for indoor arrangements.Be careful, the pinecones can be prickly. But with your pruners, you will be able to reach in and cut close enough.

3. You'll quickly fill a 10-gallon Kangaroo Bag, which holds plenty of pinecones for lots of decorations. The Kangaroo bag folds up flat after you're finished, and take up almost no space in your tool shed.

4. Pile pinecones in a basket for a simple and portable bit of décor you can place on a table in the front hall, on the dining room table, or on the hearth before the season of fires begins. For a little color, add a few apples to the basket.

Pinecones also make a great-looking centerpiece around candles in tall glass hurricanes — I found these clear glass vases at a thrift shop. Before adding your candles, put a layer of sand or pebbles in the bottom of the vase to support the candles. The glass cylinders keep off breezes and protect the pinecones from the flames.

The arrangement is easy to move around and will look great on a coffee table, on the mantle, or even on a porch table on a pleasant fall evening.

Fall is a good time to prune branches from small trees. The POWER TOOTH® Softgrip® Folding Saw is a great staple tool to have in your garden shed for 3 reasons:

• It has triple-ground, super-sharp blades that cut through small branches quickly.
• The blade locks into two positions so you can make both over cuts and undercuts.
• It folds up compactly so you can transport it easily while tending to your yard.

Log Candelabras

1. Using the POWER TOOTH® Softgrip® Folding Saw, cut short lengths from a sturdy branch, pruned from an oak tree. Each holds three candles.
2. Determine which side of the log will be the most stable. Measure the diameter of your taper candles and mark their placement on the log.
3. Use a drill, and the appropriately sized bit, to make holes for the candles.
4. A few pinecones (not too close to the candles) and an apple or two is all you need to finish this elegant but easy fall arrangement.

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