In the last couple months, we’ve been inspired to actually start putting plants in some of our spare California pottery. After all, most of these items were originally intended to be functional as well as nice to look at. We come across quite a few planters at the thrifts, as well as vases and bowls. Some of these items aren’t necessarily very valuable, and thus we decided to try and put some plants in them.

We’ve started out mostly with cacti and succulents, but in the photo above we’ve also got an Anaheim pepper plant that’s been doing well. One thing about putting plants in pots that might give pottery collectors some pause, is that you need to provide drainage for most types of plants.

This might involve drilling holes in the bottom of the pot - not an easy task in itself, even if you have a drill and a mortar bit or two. As well, drilling a hole in the bottom of a more valuable pot doesn’t sound good to a lot of folks. A solution to this problem that we’ve been trying out is to use a “cachepot“. The idea is to take an inexpensive plastic or ceramic pot and put it inside of the more valuable pot.

When the plants grows a little bigger, it will often hide the edges so you can’t even see the cachepot at all. Even if it doesn’t, the benefits of using cachepots are huge. You don’t have to drill holes in your nice pot. Also, now you can easily keep the plant indoors since the water doesn’t drain out the bottom. Make sure there’s some space between the cachepot holes and the interior of the nicer pot, so it’s not sitting in water all the time. One of the best things about using the cachepot is if the plant (god forbid) dies, or you need to switch it out, it’s just a matter of taking the cache pot out and replacing it with a new one.

We’re not great green thumbs ourselves, but so far the succulents and cacti we’ve planted are surviving. Hopefully, we’ll have more pictures to show of plants in California pottery as time goes on.

By the way, the photo above shows a pepper plant on left in a vintage Gainey Ceramics yellow pot on a vintage green saucer by the same company. On right is an Echeveria in an unknown yellow and white dripware pot.