How to Make a Terrarium

g'day welcome to I cultivate my name's Steve and today we're going indoors to look at making a terrarium terrariums are a great option for those people who want to bring plants indoors and having plants indoors can be fantastic because they tend to soften the ambience of a room and generally give it a positive feel so what do you need if you want to have a terrarium inside well to start with you need a glass container in which to grow plants the size of the container is pretty well up to you but determined by the size of the plants that you wish to grow you also of course have to have plants suitable for growing indoors ferns are the classic example and you need some potting mix some pebbles some activated charcoal and some sphagnum Moss in an ideal world now I'll talk about the purpose of each of these as we actually build out terrarium so let's start building a terrarium I'm going to start with this container here so the first thing we need to add are some pebbles now the purpose of these pebbles is to add some false drainage what you don't want is the water accumulating within the potting mix in which the plants are growing these pebbles will allow the water to move away from the potting mix and drain down into the bottom of the container so let's add [Music] you probably want to have somewhere in the region of a centimeter two centimeters at most in the container of this sauce the next thing to add is some charcoal some activated charcoal having the charcoal as a layer within the terrarium has the effect of reducing bacterial fungal growth and lastly also reducing odours so it's important to the health of your terrarium to have this layer of charcoal in here [Music] [Music] the next layer is our potting mix which of course is the medium in which our plants are going to be growing so I'm going to cover up that charcoal layer that we have just added and then I'm going to follow that with the plants but we need to prepare our plants first of all so preparing the plants remove them from the pot in which they are currently located and what we need to do is to reduce the size of this root ball now I'm just going to cut this one roughly in half now that's not a problem because the roots will grow back but you can see what I'm doing here like so I'm just going to discard that and this is what we will place into our area I'm now going to fill in around that with some potting mix now I'm going to follow the same procedure with my second plate how many plants you use is totally up to you and comes down to what your personal preference is filling around that plant with some potting mix you'll need to do the leaves around and things like that while you're doing it and the last thing that we're going to do is to add a layer of sphagnum Moss to the top the purpose of this is to help with moisture retention within the actual school itself and it also has quite a nice little direct decorative effect as well now when it comes to watering don't pour water into the terrarium just simply take a spray bottle and spray within and this will provide suitable water for quite some time you can just give it a spray like I did then every few days it turns of fertilizers all you need to do is to add a little bit of liquid seaweed concentrate from time to time using a spray bottle just as we did with the water and the last thing is from time to time just with a pair of long scissors you can just trim off the little bits that need to be tended to from time to time so to summarize in order to set up your terrarium start with a layer of gravel for drainage follow that with a layer of charcoal the charcoal is important because it reduces funding growth bacteria and also reduces odors the next layer is the potting mix in which you will grow the ferns or the type of plant that you've selected and then finish that with a layer of sphagnum Moss in order to maintain moisture within the actual potting mix itself the rest of it is really just up to your imagination the size and the shape of the container the size of the plants it's totally up to you use some imagination and have some fun so whether you're looking for something that is going to lighten the mood in your house and give them some real positive energy in the room or whether you're looking for a great holiday activity for the kids a terrarium is something that you should consider I hope you've enjoyed this video can I ask you please to go down and give us a thumbs up subscribe to this channel and go to our website I counted by dotnet and become a member of the community thanks for watching [Music]