How to preserve your jack-o’-lanterns

SALT LAKE CITY – Halloween is just days away, and what better way to decorate for the occasion than by carving jack-o’-lanterns? Last week on the KSL Greenhouse show, Taun and Maria went over how you can preserve your jack-o’-lanterns so you can keep them around longer.

The very first step to prolonging your jack-o’-lanterns is to not carve them too soon. In this case, too soon means a week or two early.

“If you carve it too soon it will rot … (the best time is) usually within three or four days before Halloween,” Taun said.

After you’ve carved your pumpkins, the next step is preserving them. Fortunately, there are a number of ways you can do this.

“One of them is to use a bleach solution where you take a quart of water with one tablespoon of chlorine bleach, shake it up a little bit, spray the inside and the outside of the pumpkin, especially focusing on where you’ve made cuts,” Taun said.

This will make the pumpkins last at least a week beyond the time they normally would.

Another option is spreading petroleum jelly or olive oil on the pumpkins. Taun suggests doing this around the cuts instead of the whole pumpkin.

It makes them look shiny and “it seals the cuts to help keep microorganisms from being able to penetrate in and decompose those areas too quickly,” he said.

One method of preserving pumpkins that’s less commonly known is the use of hairspray. This will help minimize oxygen penetration into the cuts and on the inside of the pumpkin.

The KSL Greenhouse is on every Saturday from 8 a.m.-11 a.m. You can follow the show on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and on our website.