Harvest Time! Make Your Own Fruit and Veggie Tree

The Christmas tree is the most iconic seasonal tree. It captures global recognition, and it’s a regular, celebrated part of Christmas celebration. With lights and Christmas ornaments, Christmas trees bring light and festive nostalgia inside the home. And since we’re huge fans of Christmas, we can hardly wait to put our Christmas trees up in a couple months. But then we got to thinking…why do we have to wait until Christmas for a tree? 

Autumn is officially here. It is a time of cool mornings, sunny and warm afternoons, sweaters and homemade soups. Gardens are overflowing with pumpkins, tomatoes, potatoes and greens. This year we think a harvest tree preceding the Christmas tree filled with fruit and veggie ornaments would be seasonal, and a beautiful fall decoration. 

You could go big and pull out your artificial Christmas tree to decorate as a harvest tree, but a birch twig tree would be a smaller, tabletop option. For the very industrious, making your own tree out of fallen branches would have a very natural affect. 

Then comes the fun part: decorating. We have fruits and veggies in every color of the rainbow. Your tree could go from red down to purple, or the ornaments could be all mixed together, but either way, your harvest tree will look beautiful. We’ve compiled a list, to get you started, of fruit and veggie ornaments perfect for a harvest tree.

In rainbow order, the apple basket and red delicious ornaments are perfectly red and the perfect harvest fruit for a harvest tree. The lucky mushroom and garden tomato are two red veggies that would represent all the currently ripening tomatoes, and the woodland magic of a dotted toadstool. Orange fruit ornaments could include the crate of oranges as well as the peach, tomatoes on vine (qualifying here as both a fruit and veggie!). Orange veggies are plenty: carrots, a pumpkin and miniature pumpkins, and a sweet potato round out the orange category. A slice of lemon adds a touch of yellow to the harvest tree as well as the ear of corn and morel mushrooms adding fall flavor to the mix. Adding green to the tree is easy. A lone Brussel sprout (so cute!), cauliflower, pea pod and our always-popular pickle ornament give a dash of green veg to the harvest tree. Green fruit, with the lime slice, kiwi and avocado, round out the green category with delicious options. The basket of blueberries are the lone fruit in the blue category, but always a fan favorite. An appealing harvest tree would be incomplete without them. Purple is the final delicious color in our harvest-themed tree, and the beets, rainbow carrots, blackberry, and grapes add the gorgeous deep-hued purple to the rainbow of fruits and veggies on our tree. 

In addition to decorating the harvest tree with fruits and vegetables, as a tree topper, or extra addition, the cornucopia ornament adds the quintessential harvest touch to the autumn-themed tree. Autumn is the warm-up, pre-season to the best time of the year. It’s a wonderful season of togetherness, garden bounty and transition to darker, colder months. We hope it’s a rich and fruitful season for you this year.