Closed Tropical Terrarium - 3 Years Strong!

[Music] what is going on circus squad Tanner here and I'm coming at you with another terrarium update today we're gonna be taking the three you look at none other than the clothes tropical terrarium from How to Train episode 2 this is gonna be a somewhat drawn-out introduction if you don't want to see any of that you want to jump straight ahead to the terrarium update I'll link it up right here and down in the pin comment but for those of you who want to stick around I got something that I want to say what I have here is a really cool terrarium it's not my best work it's not my favorite but it will always have a really special spot with me because this terrarium single-handedly jump-started my channel and allowed me to get to where I am today that was back in 2016 however the Surfer design channel actually goes back to 2013 and I've been on YouTube since the advent of the platform but before that point meaning 2016 I'd never been consistent with YouTube I always knew that I wanted to do something with this platform I just didn't have my voice I didn't out for my direction and the success of this terrarium video really just gave me an outlet it gave me a way to express my creativity show my art share the things that I love because I always wanted to do something with nature animals art all the things that I show on this channel but I just never really knew how what am I gonna do am I just gonna be an artist to paint some picture I really didn't know but these types of art forms to me they are the pinnacle because nature that's the best artwork there is and we're really just capturing the essence of it in ways that people can enjoy they can reconnect to nature and it's it's so much bigger than just making a terrarium or making of a barium there's so much to it and I really just see how much bigger these things are than myself as I continue to work through them and again YouTube is a vehicle which I can share all of these things with you so if Tim holds a special spot with me just like this train obviously it has its challenges it's things that we're all trying to work through with it but it really has been good to me I've had so many great opportunities and things happen to me because of it so it - along with this terrarium has been a huge blessing to me and I just want to thank you all so much for your continued support I mean I can't believe the scale that this channel is now and where it's going I only continue to see growth and I just have so many big plans and things that I had been talking about in the beginning that really are only now starting to come to fore and I thought things were gonna happen so quickly when I first started but that's what happens when you have a big vision things happen slowly and slowly but I'm working through all of it and I know that a lot of you guys think that I'm kind of changing or getting away from what I once was truth is I'm just getting more comfortable behind the camera I'm experimenting with different editing techniques and stuff like that so my vision has continually been the same without the entire time I'm the same guy was in the beginning as I am now so again I just thank you guys so much and all things considered this is an extremely special training for me so why don't we go ahead and take the 3-year look at the close tropical terrarium from how to terrarium episode 2 here it is three years later as you can tell everything's grown in extremely well especially that oak leaf creeping fig it's growing all over everything and it really needs maintain so we'll get in here in a moment and trim things up the moss has grown in really well it's all over the place that too we're probably gonna have to trim I think we'll just trim it shorter and then all the trimmings we'll just put back in the substrate to keep it going and then as you can see the anubius too is doing really well it's grown a little bit bigger it's not too much bigger it shouldn't get much bigger than that but check out that root system coming down in the false bottom and if I actually show you the underside there's just roots everywhere so it's really cool and just overall I'm really liking how this looks oh yeah I just saw some so I almost forgot about in the spring tales spring tales are still doing good I haven't opened this terrarium since last year whenever we did maintenance so again it's doing really good I get a lot of questions of people saying how often should I open it how often should I water it all that sort of thing honestly you only need to water it or do anything like that if you do maintenance and you don't even have to do maintenance but I like to do it because I like to keep all my plants trimmed keep it looking how I want it to look because I view this as more of an art form than just I'm married to the idea of a terrarium I know a lot of people are married to the idea of just setting up an ecosystem and letting it thrive and all that sort of thing although that is an aspect of it that I find fascinating I'm more interested in the art form about it so if I have to do a little bit of maintenance or something like that I prefer that actually I like to be hands-on with it but the hands-off nature of a trim is also kind of nice because I can neglect them for a little bit and I know that they're still gonna do fine we got a preliminary look at everything and as you can tell it's looking good but in order to know how it's really doing we gotta give it a smell so one of those times that I really wish we had smell-o-vision because this thing smells great it smells just like the forest it looks and smells good and those are both telltale signs of a healthy and thriving ecosystem but as you can see it's overgrown so why don't we go ahead and get out the terrarium toolbox and give it a trim we don't need much for this one I'll just get my curved scissors my curved tweezers and we'll get some alcohol pads as well or just one should be fine I'll also get my little copper tool here keep these alcohol pads on hand so that I can sterilize my toes before using them from setup to setup this is something that I normally don't show but I figured it was worth showing since I put out the toe box what I did is I just wipe off any surfaces that would be used I don't really care as much about these but whenever you're cutting the plants it helps them a really nice clean tool also do the tweezers as well just the tips here and copper as well we'll just do the ends can I don't really care about as much about the spots where I'm holding it mainly just where it's coming in contact with this but these air dry for a second and then we'll get in here before I get in here and start trimming I just want to move around with my tweezers and just get a sense of what is going on just to see how all this is trailing what I want to trim so once it's trimmed it's trimmed obviously it will grow back but if you don't have to trim something then why would you want to okay so for short this one I want trimmed I'm gonna get it right there pull the cutting out and this one I want to trim all the way back to there and up this one and some two let's get a little out of hand it's like that already looking better I also don't really care for all this one is growing so it's right there pull it out good on this side the ficus is growing in so densely that it's actually starting to shade out of the undergrowth and kill it so what we want to do is really just trim off some of this bulk up here that's really not needed so I see this one here prime culprit right there we kind of work this back mm-hmm I don't like how this one is shading out the anubius you can tell it's getting kind of yellow because it wasn't getting enough light I also want to thin it out a little bit down here because I can tell that it's just way too thick plants are choking each other out this is one of the things I always talk about why I like to do maintenance left unattended these plants will just out-compete each other the strongest will survive and obviously that's what happens in nature but in this type of environment if you want to keep a certain aesthetic if you want certain plants to do well it really helps to just do take a few moments to do something like this makes all the difference I also want to go around and trim the moss if you see all the stuff that's up against the glass here it's actually growing up the glass I don't careful a little bit of it is tall but I want to cut it maybe in half or so just so it's not growing up that much like that after I snip it I really just get my tweezers here press it down over top of the substrate like so since we've had this open for a little bit we've lost some of the moisture and humidity so I'm gonna do is I got my sprayer here and I'm just gonna spray a little bit of dechlorinated tap water in here literally I'm just gonna add one two three spritzes those are to the glass and I'll do one two three four five two in here so it wasn't very much and again you don't need to be watering these unless you open them to do maintenance or if the lid isn't airtight and water's escaping but in this type of scenario you really don't need much another reason that I like to do maintenance on terrariums is that the inside of the glass can get kind of dirty you may have noticed that as we're going through this but it will get covered in moss spores and stuff like that that can obstruct light from coming into the container and that's hindering or stopping the girth of the plants altogether so you really want to keep it clean both on the outside and inside so cleaning dust off the outside as well is a good idea so what I have is a microfiber cloth I'm just gonna wipe the inside of this out this is one of the reasons why I sprayed the glass down with water helps me to get rid of all this stuff loosens it up because it can get kind of crusty on there so if you spray it down ahead of time it can really help you get it nice and clean and this one is open enough that I can do it all by hand sometimes I'll cut off a section of the microfiber and use my tweezers to do it but this one is open enough so I can just do it all by hand and here it is nice and clean looks much better than it did previously everything's trimmed glass is clean and it's looking crisp [Music] before I got antsy up the container I also want to clean off the lid here and replace the gasket as you can see it's all dry rot and just split in half so definitely check that overtime I bought this container at a thrift store originally so who knows how old it was before I got my hands on it and it was already kind of dry rotten at that point we've got a replacement that we'll put on here in a second so like before just spray this out with a little bit of water get the microfiber cloth and clean it out all right so clean looking good let's get this gasket on here just stretch it out much better and with that we're finally ready to close it back up for another year as you can see we've got a lot of nice trimmings of oak leaf creeping fig from the deal so I'm going to do is add these into my propagation bin and then we'll take a look at the terrarium [Music] and there you have it the three-year update on the clothes tropical train from how to train you my pisode - if you want to see the video in which I initially set this up I'll link it up here and down the video description it's packed with loads of good and relevant information they can definitely help you get started on making a closed terrariums that said my delivery wasn't as strong back then and I personally can't watch it as I find it a little bit crunchy but if you're new to terrariums it's a great place to start so I do recommend it and I think I'll end it there surface squad as always thank you so much for watching and your continued support if you wanna see more terrarium content like this you want to see the future update on the how to terrarium series and more nature related projects be sure to stay tuned now catch you on the next one peace [Music] [Music]

Channel: SerpaDesign

Views: 264,754

Keywords: terrarium, closed terrarium, eternal terrarium, how to terrarium, tropical terrarium, make a terrarium, update, bottle garden

Id: cgKErW4pWgw

Length: 14min 41sec (881 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 14 2019