How to Make a DIY Outdoor Halloween Tree

Who wants large creepy trees surrounding your front door any time of year but Halloween? But when October comes around, a large, gnarly, spooky tree becomes a fun outdoor Halloween tree. Halloween outdoor decor near the front porch adds a slightly ominous creepy feel for the trick-and-treaters and fun-loving neighbors.

These spooky and festive DIY Halloween yard decorations took us a couple of hours, and we had a great time puttering outdoors enjoying Fall while we did it.

With this DIY outdoor Halloween tree, we can “plant” it just before Halloween and poof, it is gone right afterward. Using branches and local dollar store supplies, this Halloween outdoor decor idea is easy to make and inexpensive.

How to Make a DIY Outdoor Halloween Tree

Outdoor Halloween Tree Supplies

We live surrounded by trees, so the first thing was to go for a walk and choose branches from several large fallen trees and branches in the forest. Take the whole family for a fun fall walk. You will inevitably find large dead branches in any forested area with deciduous trees. As long as you use fallen branches, I doubt anyone would care if you took some from a city park either. Ask first if you can, and don’t take live trees. It’s a great excuse for a Halloween-themed outing with the family. In total, the whole thing cost us $20 Canadian for our Halloween trees.

If your branches are light, you can use black spray paint on your spooky trees. Just give them a quick spray to darken the light areas. As we used very large dead branches with dark grey bark, we didn’t need black spray paint, which saved the time it would take to paint them.

How to Set Up Your Outdoor Halloween Tree

So now that you have your branches sorted out, you need to find the best place to set up your Halloween tree.

Choosing a Safe Spot for Your Halloween Tree

The creepy trees need to be somewhere near the walking path of the trick-and-treaters, but safely placed far enough away to keep dry branches from poking anyone, especially around the eyes. Instead of placing the tree over the sidewalk and front porch entrance, we swung the large tree around so the branches were positioned over the flower gardens.

Securing the Halloween Tree in Soil

If your tree can be placed in a flower bed or somewhere with dirt, dig a one-foot-deep hole to secure it. Place the trunk of the tree in the hole, then fill the hole back in.

To keep the tree sturdy, pound two pieces of rebar, 4 feet or longer, into the ground on each side of the tree. Make sure the rebar is at least a foot down into the ground. Secure the spooky tree trunk to each piece of rebar using plastic zip ties. Make sure everything is very solid. There shouldn’t be any movement. If there is, add more rebar, pound the existing rebar deeper, or add more plastic zip ties.

For this Halloween tree, we kept the dead foliage around the bottom to help camouflage the base of the tree. Leaves or more branches would work, but I don’t think leaving the rebar showing is that big of a deal, especially in the dark.

Securing the Halloween Tree on Concrete

If you have concrete near the front porch and can’t use rebar, use something for added weight at the base of the tree. Use a large bucket filled with bricks, rocks, or dry cement, as long as it’s heavy and packed tightly enough to keep the tree stable.

How much weight you need will depend on how large your tree branch is. It will be a bit of a test-and-see situation. To keep the tree solid, place the trunk of the tree into a large bucket before adding the weight.

Secondly, if using a bucket base, the tree needs to be close enough to your house that you can anchor it to the structure. After placing ours in a bucket, we attached the side of the tree to our porch using florist wire and zip ties. Then we swung the tree branch out so the pathway to our front door stayed clear.

The last thing we did was camouflage the bucket by covering it with a large black plastic bag. I then encircled mine with the black fabric I had in my stash, but it was not necessary to do so.

Then close the garbage bag over the bucket. We added some black Halloween cloth from our stash.

Note: We had two storms at our house after we first put in our spooky trees including one with a wind warning, and the Halloween trees stayed securely in place. The wiring held both the tree and the decorations securely.

Adding Bats to Your Halloween Tree

Bats are kind of cute, except for the germs and the getting caught in your hair part. Thankfully plastic bats don’t have any of those concerns, so I find them adorable and fun with just a tad of spooky.

Place the bats wherever you like so they can hang freely. Attach the plastic bats to the branches with floral wire. Make sure the strings that come with the bats are securely attached. I made the knots on our looped strings larger so they wouldn’t pull through the bats and gave them a bit of hot glue for extra measure.

Hang the bats wherever you like, making sure to spread them out. Attach each bat with a small piece of florist wire wrapped tightly around the branch and twisted to hold. Before hanging each bat, I made sure the dollar store bat hangers were secure by making the knots larger at the ends of the strings so they were less likely to pull through.

We had a black owl from several years ago and black crows I wired on as well. If you want to increase the creepy factor, you could twist a bunch of plastic snakes around the branches, or add spiders and fake spider webs. I thought about using snakes, but it was too creepy for me. I avoid all spiders, even plastic ones.

Adding Candles to Your Halloween Tree

The little black votive-sized candles were 2 for $1.25 at the Dollar Tree. They come with batteries. Hubs attached them to the tree for me by placing them near two branches and then wrapping them securely with black electrical tape. The downside of these candles is that their battery life is probably quite short. Secondly, on Halloween night, we will need to take a few minutes and turn each one on individually. I don’t mind doing that one bit, as it only takes five minutes to light up the entire tree.

The votives provide a little extra light in our front yard for Halloween, and they do a great job of letting the kids know there is decoration nearby.

This Halloween tree is part of a few outdoor DIY Halloween decorations we made this year. As I get the other DIY projects finished and the tutorials written, I will link them below.

Love this DIY outdoor Halloween tree idea? Pin it for later so you can come back when you’re ready to decorate your porch or yard for Halloween.

Other Halloween Outdoor Decor Ideas