Decorated pots and flowering orchids

During October and November I spent some time decorating plastic and terracotta plant pots. I painted some larger terracotta ones to put out the front of the garage where the old flower bed once stood, and I wanted more blue pots. I also painted some smaller ones to put on the terrace during the summer.

Most are stencilled but the one pot on the right is decoupaged - with the same paper serviette that I used for my Christmas tree baubles last year. The smaller pots were initially painted with chalk paint, then stencilled (or decoupaged), and finally finished off with several coats of clear varnish for protection. The larger pots were painted with an exterior paint so I just varnished over the stencilled portion of the pot.

This is the other side of the pots.

Work in progress - the two terracotta pots to go outside the garage are on the left - note the dragonfly! And of course there are some butterflies, too. 😀

The next photos were taken at New Year of my orchids which are mostly flowering again - it seems like they never stop! The white Phalaenopsis had just finished flowering when it put out another shoot from the old stem! It just goes to show - don't cut off the stems of Phalaenopsis after flowering.

In the foreground is my Jewel Orchid (Ludisia discolor) which really needs repotting and is starting to suffer and lose its leaves - I'm a bit worried about it. But I can't repot until it finishes flowering.

Two different Phalaenopsis plants - there's another with spotty leaves in our bedroom and with the white one, that makes four flowering at the moment!

This is my Dendrobium which is my favourite orchid and it has been flowering since September.

By the time they finish flowering all the wild ones outside will be popping up so living here I will rarely be without orchids in flower. 😁

Two weeks later - unfortunately we had a surprising minus 6C and minus 4C the following night and I think most of my patio plants have been killed. My Kaffir Lime looks dead although the Meyer Lemon still has a few green leaves amongst the brown ones. Everything else looks brown and trashed, even the plants well under cover on the covered patio where normally they survive winter without any problems. So all I can do is wait and see whether my lantanas come back to life (as they always lose their leaves in winter anyway) and hopefully my lemon will survive, and we will see if anything else comes back to life. My fault really for not checking the weather forecast, although I wouldn't have had enough horticultural fleece or bubble wrap for all my plants. Geraniums can be easily replaced after all.