How to Make a Terrarium Without An Opening

hey everyone tanner of surfer design here and welcome back to another terrarium build what i have here is a flower aquarium and if you saw how to term episode 2 then you likely remember this container now you may be wondering what the heck is a flower aquarium so what it is is it's meant to be a sort of a showpiece for flowers specifically the type that you would get in a bouquet so they're already chopped off of the plant and it's just a flower on a stem and if you see here this is just a little rubber piece that goes on to the bottom of the actual glass container and it creates an airtight seal which will be great for a terrarium but if you see on here it has little sort of slots and what they do is you would just put the stem of the flower in there and put the glass container back on top and what's cool about this container is that supposedly it has a magnifying effect now I've tried to look at it and see if it actually works it doesn't really look like it does but I don't know we'll say that it does but we want to turn this into a terrarium and there are a couple of ways that we could go about doing that I could have simply put the container on the base like that put the cap on and left it at that the thing is that this would have been a pretty standard trim although it's a even still a cool looking container and the cap itself would be airtight it wouldn't be that unique in the presentation of the container itself now how we lay out the terrarium could be pretty cool what I want to do with this is have it facing down so there's seemingly no opening to the terrarium itself but we have a fully set up a terrarium in there I had been putting this off for quite a while about a year because I really couldn't come up with a plan to make it to areum here with with the opening being on the bottom but I came up with a pretty solid way to make it happen so I have a couple of things laid out before me and these are gonna allow us to make the terrarium the that I had just described what I have here is some knitting mesh and if you want to get your hands on this you can find it pretty fine this is almost as fine as some of the Windows screen mesh that I use it's probably a little bit larger but it will work for this terrarium I also have some 100% silicone already in a coking gun and I've scissors of course so you're probably wondering how is this gonna allow us to make the terrarium the way that I had described bear with me here because this might not make sense as I'm describing it but what I'm gonna do is have two cylinders of knitting mesh one will be slightly smaller than the other one and the one that's slightly smaller will have knitting mesh on the bottom so if my container here and what I'm gonna do is make a cylinder of the knitting mesh right the first the first cylinder which goes in this will be the larger one I'll silicone it to the inside of the container here then once that's dry we make this next cylinder which will be slightly smaller and that one will go inside of the larger one and it will have a bottom on it as well maybe thinking even still how is that going to you to make the terrarium the way that you had described well once we have the cylinder the first one that is in here we can make the terrarium on the exterior of the cylinder there will just be an opening in the middle of the terrarium then one we have the other one that has the bottom on it we can build it the rest of the terrarium and that stick it up inside of here and it will be as simple as that now if that didn't make sense to you stay with me as I am a hundred percent certain this is gonna work so the first thing I'm going to do is just kind of clean off this container with a microfiber cloth and I had previously cleaned it with alcohol pretty thoroughly so I don't really think I need to do that again looks pretty clean and I'm gonna probably first thing I'll do is just cut this to manageable size I already know that it is wide enough that it could go in here and it really doesn't need to be that tall so what I'm gonna do is just cut along and I don't need to measure it or anything because the grid itself will show me how to cut it yeah I think that would be good so now what I have to do is figure out how much of it I have to cut off it looks like I have to cut off this way that is like I should explain a little bit better it is a little bit more than an inch and you'll see what I mean by this in just a second so cut that off now it looks to be about right I'm gonna zip tie it up here just to test it any luck this should fit in there yeah it even looks like it might be well yeah that looks like it might be too tall I'm gonna cut a little bit more off of it naughty now I might even tie this with some fishing line instead of zip ties since they're kind of bulky but anyways put that in there that yeah that is gonna work okay so now I decided that I was gonna tie this up with some pushing on instead of these zip ties I think they're just a little bit too bulky and will cause more problems later on let me get some of this and what I'm gonna do is just lay two of these on top of each other and then just kind of weave it in and out so we've got the first cylinder cut and put together and maybe what I was saying earlier might make sense now but now we're gonna cut the smaller one and this is the one that's actually gonna go inside of this one perfect so it's the right width now I want to get cut to the right height so now food should work perfect it's alright it's a little bit taller I'm not really concerned about that but what I want to do now is actually silicone this one onto the inside of there and the way that I'll do that is quite simple I'm just going to run a bead of silicone on the inside of here and then stick it right on top I'll just do need a silicon all around here doesn't need to be pretty cuz you're not gonna see it ever then what we're gonna do is hopefully just slide this on there and it has partially stuck on there so I'm just gonna let whatever's on there now dry and then we'll add more silicon as needed once that stuff cures so now it's about a day later and I got this all taken care of I actually put the additional silicon on before I went to bed the one day and neglected to record that but basically all that I did was just you know talk a little bit of extra silicon and there it wasn't really much but it's dried in there and I think maybe now you can really start to see what I was telling you about so well I actually build land or a terrarium if you will around this so you won't see it and then this which will make in just a moment will go up inside of here and that too will have land on it so in theory it should create a seamless look however before we move forward with anything else I want to just kind of clean up some of the still account on here with the glade and now I'm just kind of cleaning off the outside of this a little bit with the microfiber cloth just so I can get a better idea of what I'm working with we can actually clean it again later on and I'm gonna have to clean out the inside of this as well so at this point I'm content without clean this is and initially I was kind of concerned that I put too much silicone on there but as you could see once it's on the base you can't even see any of that so it's gonna look really cool once we get it going here but what I have to do next is actually make the mesh container if you will that goes inside of here so let me just test it out real quick pretty sure it's just the exact size of this it's a snug fit or actually it's like the silicone it sticks to it so you can't really like pull it in and out which I guess is a good thing because once it's in there will be it'll be in there but I'm gonna cut some more fishing line and we'll put it together just like the other one the first one that we made it was actually overlapped this one I have to make side by side like that and the reason is that it won't fit in there flush if we don't and that about does it for this one see this is really strong I actually think that might have been a better solution than the zip ties not necessarily just because it's lower profile but I mean that thing's not coming apart this should just fit right inside of there I'm not gonna put it in all the way you get the idea so now I have this round piece and what I'll do is cut it out to the dimensions of this and you know perfect fit so now I got to cut out some more fishing line and we will tie this segment on to there as well at this point I pretty much have it all tied up I just got to finish it off here and this is gonna be pretty cool this turned out really well just like that and this should just slide right on out and I can probably actually put some vaseline in between these so that they slide together easier but we will cross that bridge once it comes hopefully all that jargon that I was spinning off at the beginning of the video hopefully it makes sense now basically what I'm gonna do is fill this up with rocks create a false bottom in here put the dirt on it and then plant it with plants and then with this part of the container again I followed up with rocks on the outside creating the false bottom and also use a mesh barrier on top of those rocks and then on top of that put dirt plants moss that sort of thing and then once both of these are plant trays essentially because they won't be a terrarium yet just slide this on top of it and then it will in in theory at least create a seamless looking environment now I'm probably gonna have to try to conceal this in some way or just let it grow in over time and hide itself but that's essentially what's gonna happen there before we can proceed any further I have to get rid of this contraption on this cap so I'm just gonna cut away at it until it's gone I tried cutting it off with the razor blade but I feel like it was just ineffective and I was also concerned that I would cut into the bottom of this because I really needed to stay the way that it is so I'm just gonna meticulously or tediously whatever you think would be the proper term just cut into this and remove sections a little bit at a time so after about a half hour of chipping away at this I finally got that piece or moved here solved the excess from it and the reason that I had to do that was this piece right here it will be flush with the bottom here and if we would have had that little protrusion it would get in the way of that once it would be on here and I set these aside for just a moment and talk about what I have here I just have some Windows screen mesh here this is typically what I like to use for false bottoms this with a combination of rocks you've probably seen that in a lot of my other videos and if you're not familiar with the false bottom process follow this link up here and it will really just go into detail about this whole thing and so what I have here is just some gravel from Home Depot it's about $3 $4 for a 50-pound bag so you really can't go wrong you could also use aquarium gravel really any type of fine gravel that you can find and what I'm going to do is just put about an inch of it in here so if got a layer of gravel down in here or whatever type of false bottom I could have used I feel like for this since the mending mesh already has holes in it and whatnot this was probably the best way to go but I'm just gonna set this on top of my Windows screen mesh and I'm gonna cut out a just a square to start because it will be easier to manage and then a circle which will be slightly larger than the diameter of this it doesn't have to be perfect no one's gonna see it and this will just go right on top of here and the reason that I did it a little bit larger is so that the substrate doesn't get down into that rock layer and there's a number of reasons why we don't want that to curve if you watch that false bottom demonstration you'll learn all about that but we've got that mesh down in there and it's good I'm just gonna set a few more rocks on top of it just to keep it in place we'll set that aside next we have to get the gravel in here but before we do that I have a microfiber cloth right here and my tweezers and using my tweezers I'm just gonna try to do the best I can to clean off the glass and here using this microfiber cloth so now we're gonna put rocks in here and the mesh as well this is really gonna be easier said than done I think what I'll do is put the rocks in like this and then just get them to fall down in there okay so I got a decent amount of gravel in there and now the container is a total mess so I'm going to do is get this microfiber cloth once more and we will do we can to clean out so as I was cleaning this out it just wasn't working for me and part of that is because the gravel itself had dirt on it so I just thought why don't I just do this get my mixer and just spray it out and it will eventually or it should at least drain out of here because it's all yep so now that I have this more or less cleaned out I'm gonna get some paper towel and dry it off because I don't want any of that excess water in there and I want to be able to see so let me get my tweezers and from cleaning that out I already have a decent amount of moisture in here so whenever we add water later on I'm probably not gonna add very much so now that I evolved my gravel in place I'm going to basically cut a circle out of this that has another circle cut out of the middle and I'm just gonna eyeball this it doesn't really have to be perfect so that looks like it would be good enough I actually kind of just shape it a little bit okay and then I will cut this out into the center like that a little donut of sorts so all that I'm gonna do is just feed it up through the bottom of this and then try my best to get it in place and that's really the whole challenge of this terrarium building the land and whatnot in here that will be really simple it's getting everything in here up to the bottom so okay it's almost like I need a hook yeah actually here I'll make one so I just got some copper wire cut it and then bent it into little hook I think this will help me out tremendously so now I'm gonna start putting the substrate up in here what I'm using is that ABG mix and if you want to know how to make it just follow the link I however altered this one slightly I added a little bit of potting soil in it organic potting soil I'm just experimenting a little bit with this terrarium so I figured I'd mix up the substrate as well as you can see it's pretty difficult to get this in here luckily I have this little thing I can just kind of even out the substrate and I don't think that planting it is gonna be as hard as it is getting any of this stuff up in here but we'll see I apologize if I don't have as nice of camera angles and overall filming in this video as I typically would it's just it's really hard to try to show what I'm doing right now it's really hard to do to something else I'm gonna try is because this was really hard to even out with my fingers I'm gonna use a paper towel with the tweezers and this actually seems to be working well but I need to get it at a different angle this is also kind of stressful if you will because I have almost dropped this container several times it's not easy to hold it and work on the inside at the same time and I am thinking that that is enough substrate looks pretty cool so now I'm gonna add the charcoal and you might be wondering why I didn't put it in the other part of the terrarium and I did it simply because of convenience reasons I think it would have been pretty tough to try to get charcoal in there so I just put a little bit in there and then we will top it off with the substrate which I wish it was that easy to get the substrate and the other one but whatever the thing with this terrarium that really limits me is the fact that I'm not able to open it to maintain it so with that said choosing the plants was really something that I had to keep in mind now I'm not gonna add really anything too substantial in here normally in a terrarium this size I would add oak leaf creeping fig or fight if I guess remulak were folia I can't add that because once it starts going it will really kind of take this over and fill it in so I have to choose plants that will stay relatively small and that aren't gonna fill up the space so actually I have a few patches of moss the mosses that I have here are pretty low growing now I don't actually know what kind they are unfortunately they're just ones that I've sourced locally so I'm gonna do is and this one's on a piece of bark but which is nice because it'll make it easier for me to put in here and most of the ones that you'll see me put in here actually are on bark but I'm just gonna set it in here and then use my tweezers to kind of put it in place and I'm just gonna take out substrate as necessary once again this is like pretty stressful trying to get this stuff in here this is what it would be nice to have a cameraman instead of my tripod that's why my cameraman of choice although I did say that this is mainly gonna be a moss terrarium there are a couple of plants that I will be adding I think you guys will think are pretty cool and I also want to do a fair amount of hard scape in here so if you see I got this nice piece of drift what if I can just made it and this is actually covered in moss which is cool so it will grow eventually cool so that will actually cover up some of that knitting mesh if it looks like it will show through at all as I said like the moss will grow over it in time but I would prefer to not see any of it initially or wherever so I like that I think that would be pretty cool once the moss kind of grows around it and will have plants in here as I said so as you can see I intend to have this the side with the log on it and tend to have that be the front of it and then what you're seeing me build now will actually be the background so me that's nice moss I've had it grown in my varium for quite a while I actually see that there's a piece of sphagnum Moss on it which originally want that in here since it grows kind of large but if it mainly sticks to the background I actually think it would be cool because it will add a little bit of depth now I'm gonna start adding the plants and I think that I actually have to remove a little bit of substrate from this but if you've seen my video on how to propagate moss here I'll put a little link up there in case you haven't basically all of these mosses that you see I got them locally from some woods behind my house and a lot of times plants will come with them and you can do what you can to clean them off and whatnot but inevitably you'll have some other plants that will kind of hitchhike and what happened was I got all these really nice ferns that came in with them and they don't grow very large so I think it will be a cool addition for this so we'll kind of have that piece of wood up front with a couple of friends growing in the background of it and I think that will look really cool so that's why I'm kind of removing some of this substrate since it has some on it and since this is already acclimated to the conditions of the terrarium I'm fairly confident that it will do well in here if it doesn't I mean it's not the end of the world but I obviously would prefer that it did here's some more of it it kind of grew this is actually on a piece of wood yeah that'll look real cool I think it's gonna be a challenge getting it into the terrarium itself but I think that it will be rewarding and as of now I don't know what kind of friend this is if I'm able to find it out I'll put it somewhere on the screen or mention it in the video description but as of now I don't know what this is unfortunately so that's I mean that's pretty much all that we need on there out a little bit of moss to kind of kickstart it growing over this in case we have some that sticks over okay so now we're looking at the back again I'm gonna add one more piece whoops it fell off I'm gonna add one more patch of this moss so now what I'm gonna do is water this main section and to do so I'm just gonna use a pipette so got this here my little pipette and I'm just gonna kind of so unfortunately that pipette didn't work I couldn't get it to go up in there if I would have had a syringe that would work but I have a mister and the reason I didn't want to do this initially was because I didn't want to put too much water in here with some of the water added now I'm just gonna get paper towel on tweezers again and just kind of clean up this mess I just made as you can see I got quite the mess going on right now and what I'm gonna do is just add a few strands of moss to this one put them up front well this way I actually so yeah we'll put some here so we're just about ready to put this into the main terrarium the only thing is that we need some springtails so what I have here is just a piece of charcoal with springtails on it and I'm just gonna flick them off into there you're probably thinking well they're probably like King all over your table and whatnot the thing is like once they get in this substrate I doubt they're gonna try to go anywhere else there you can see them crawling around on there so let's get it in the terrarium now and so really I got to do this just right or I'm gonna mess it up so got this and put the ferns in first just hope that I don't move that piece of driftwood at all I'm trying to be very careful it's moving slightly hmm there's a way to so now I've got to put the cap on it of course because as is water and air it's actually not airtight right now so I go do is just slip this on like so you can put it on the base and then we'll clean it off with the microfiber cloth [Music] that about does it guys I hope you enjoyed this demonstration it's definitely of the more unique terrariums that you've probably seen on this channel thus far however I will mention that you don't need a flower aquarium to do this you might have thought hey I can't get my hands on that or you don't want to get that it's totally fine if you have containers like this where they're kind of dramatically shaped and by that I mean it's kind of small on the bottom and it goes upward into a larger container like this as you could imagine you could do the same exact thing in something like that or even something like this and say the cap was a screw-on it's really not gonna make a difference you'll just screw it on and you can do the same exact thing so as always I appreciate you guys and I thank you for watching as this really wouldn't be possible without you if you like this video definitely hit the thumbs up I have a lot more creative content coming up in the future just like this so if you're not yet subscribed definitely do so so you can catch it as soon as it's up and that's it guys I'll see you next time and peace

Channel: SerpaDesign

Views: 1,084,532

Keywords: terrarium, closed terrarium, nature, naturalistic, natural, DIY, do it yourself, how to, learn, no opening, bottle garden, nature design, serpadesign, Tanner Serpa

Id: bN_pT2664i0

Length: 33min 12sec (1992 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 10 2017