11 November

See the Best Pumpkin Preservation Trick

You spend all that time and effort making your jack o’lantern look just the way you want it, only to have poor Jack turn into a mildewy mess before Halloween even gets here. Don’t let your pumpkin carving skills go to waste!

We tested 5 different methods for preserving jack o’lanterns, and one method turned out to be the clear winner. Read on to see the time-lapse video of our results, and to score a chance to win a free bottle of Wet & Forget Outdoor!

Not all Pumpkin Preservation Methods are Equal

We heard about a lot of different methods for preserving pumpkins, so we thought we’d give a few of them a shot. Here are the ones we chose to use:

Pouring silica gel inside the jack o’lantern.
Rubbing the exposed insides of the jack o’lantern with petroleum jelly.
Sealing the exposed insides of the jack o’lantern with clear-coat spray paint.
Soaking the jack o’lantern in a diluted bleach solution for several hours, and then spraying the insides with a bleach solution every few days.
Soaking the jack o’lantern in a diluted solution of Wet & Forget Outdoor, and then Spraying it every few days with Wet & Forget Indoor Mold + Mildew Disinfectant Cleaner.

Mold and mildew growth is the cause of your jack o’lantern’s early demise, so all of these methods try to short-circuit the growth in some way.

Silica gel is meant to keep the jack o’lantern too dry for mold growth, clear-coat paint and petroleum jelly try to form a barrier and keep mold from reaching the pumpkin’s surface, and the bleach and Wet & Forget methods are designed to kill mold and mildew.