Project 52 - Week 16 and 17 - Painting up a few Plant Pots and Making a Succulent/Cacti Garden

After my absence from posting on this challenge over the Easter weekend, and fresh from watching  Monty Don on Friday night's Gardener's World, I was inspired to make my succulent and cacti garden this weekend.  I've been meaning to make one for a while now and the plants have been gradually gathering on the kitchen window sill.  It was time I created a new home for them and de-cluttered the kitchen a little more.  Here's a picture of the ones I'd collected over the last few months, specifically for this project.

Most were inexpensive finds at car boot sales or school/Christmas fairs, etc.  A few were bought from Ikea or the garden centre or had been given to me as gifts at some point.  I wasn't entirely sure what soil to use for the succulent garden, so Monty Don's demonstration of making up a succulent planter in Friday night's programme was a timely godsend.

Spurred on with the information I needed, on Saturday morning I ventured out to the garden centre.  I needed some compost to continue with my seed sowing endeavours, the earlier results of which haven't been too successful due to the abundance of snails in our garden, which have now finished off my lovely rows of carrots seedlings and my tomato seedlings.  I was not best pleased and now find myself needing to start from scratch again.

I also needed some grit and a container to plant up my succulents and cacti, preferably stone or terracotta as they are porous.  I didn't think I had anything suitable to hand, so although I don't like to buy new, on this occasion I decided to take a look and see what the garden centre had to offer.  There wasn't anything suitable, so it was at this point that I regretted not buying a butlers sink I had seen at the car boot sale last week, which although I didn't ask the price of, I'm sure would have been more economical than anything I was likely to find around where I live. 

After lunch, I was thinking of taking a stroll up the road, where there are a few vintage shops that might just have something that would fit the bill.  I was prepared to allow myself a spending limit of £30, as that was all the cash I had in my purse.  I know this may sound a lot, but I wasn't sure I'd find anything for this amount hereabouts. 

Before heading out, I decided to just have a quick look in the garden and see if I did in fact have anything suitable and I was glad I did as I found three terracotta pots, a couple of which were quite shallow and one which was slightly deeper.  Three was a good number to make an arrangement, so I decided to go with these and save myself some money.  I can always move them again into a single container if I find one at some point in the future.

It actually worked out quite well as I was able to put all the cacti in one pot, and then the succulents in the other two.  I included a pretty thrift plant I'd bought at the car boot sale last week for a bit of floral interest.

I mixed the compost and grit 50/50 and planted the plants into it, watering them in and then covering the surface with more grit to give a finished look.  I was pretty pleased with the results and as it had cost me less than £10 in compost and grit, I was happy.

 

To make up for not posting last week, I also completed another task from my list this weekend.  I had a couple of terracotta pots left over from some of the herbs I bought for the herb planter.  Here they are.  Not very inspiring and a bit pasty looking.

They are the type without holes in them so are best as decorative plant pots that you put a plastic pot into.  I wanted to paint or decorate them to make them a bit more interesting.

I decided to try out my version of an idea I had seen on Pinterest.  It involved the use of blackboard paint to create a name plate on the pot.  Firstly, I painted the inside and outside of the pots with pale grey emulsion paint, left over from painting the sewing room.  When this was dry, I used a bird stencil I have made fabric appliques from and drew around it onto the pot, before carefully painting it in with blackboard paint I bought from the DIY store.  It was quite expensive as they only had the larger tins in stock - £11 to be precise, but I didn't mind as I had saved myself some money on using existing pots for the succulents and cacti and I can always use this paint again for various other projects. 

As the pots were going to be used for housing a couple of Aloe Vera plants indoors, I didn't waterproof the outside of them as I liked the chalky matt finish, but I did PVA the inside which is more likely to come into contact with water, to prevent it seeping into the clay and causing the paint to peel off.

Here's the finished result. 

Not particularly expertly painted, but I like them and I can re-use them for lots of different plants in the future by just wiping clean and rewriting the plant name.  I now need to check out blackboard paint projects on Pinterest to get some more inspiration.

So, two tasks completed  and I've managed to catch up once again and am back on track with this challenge.  Joining in with Dreamer of Living a Slow and Simple Life in completing a task a week over the course of the year.