How to Make an Indoor Water Garden! 🌿💦 // Garden Answer

hey guys how's it going today I'm putting together an indoor water garden that's what we do this time of year in January when we just got fresh snow outside so we kind of turn our attention to indoor house plant projects and I just think that these look so neat I don't have a ton of experience with indoor water plants so if you do I would love to hear your experience and some of the things that you've learned that Gleave comments down below so we can all learn from you guys but I have kept a plant alive in a jar full of water for the past three years in fact sitting right here so I'm gonna just share with you guys what I've done to keep that plant alive I'll show you how I plant them in the container what I use in some of the like little tips I've picked up along the way so the first thing you need to do is gather your supplies now you can use any kind of container that's clear glass that will hold water I had all of these containers already except for this big tall when I did go pick this one up recently because I really wanted a tall vertical accent where I'm kind of displaying all of these but you can use mason jars you can you use flower vases whatever you have and then you need to go get your plants so you can find these water plants some garden centers will carry them not typically in the wintertime but maybe some do but you can find them at most pet stores because you know any pet store that has like aquarium and fish supplies they have plants typically and they're really inexpensive so that my biggest one right here was originally seven dollars they were running a sale and I got it for $4 and the rest of them I got for about $2 a piece which I thought was amazing so it's a very inexpensive project you don't need a lot of of things to make this happen or you don't need a lot of like a huge budget either the other thing you're gonna need is something to put your plants in to weigh them down kind of a planting medium there's a lot of talk out there on what you should be using for this project I just use the aquatic gravel which is right here you can find it in bags smaller than this and bags larger than this and in different sizes as well a lot of people like to use a half and half mix of the gravel and a sharp sand and then some people will also use which I have it right here some people will use horticultural charcoal which helps keep the water fresh but I haven't used that for mine and haven't had any problem but I wanted to show you that as an option the thing about the charcoal is that it is buoyant it will want to float so if you do use this in your container you'll want to put the little pieces just like a feet little pinch of charcoal at the very bottom before you put your rocks in to kind of help weigh it down last couple of things there is aquatic plant food tablets this I got in the pond section at the garden center so this is meant for bigger potted plants so you kind of have to like do the math and figure out how much these little tiny plants will need and basically these come in a tablet that I would crush up and just put a little tiny sliver in about once a month to keep the plants happy and then this right here this is a sludge destroyer if you have an algae problem a lot of times when you initially plant these you might have an initial algae bloom which is kind of normal you can use something like this to help it's just a natural bacteria it won't hurt your plants at all but you know what I my method on keeping them clear is taking the plants out taking the rocks out every few weeks and washing them all off just with water no soap and that just keeps my plants clear the gravel nice and my water never smells so I usually skip this alright so before I get into kind of more of the educational side of the water plants I want to put this one together for you guys and show you what I do I've just been holding this plant over in this container just in its little pot I'm going to go ahead and pour this water out and start like from scratch so let me pour this in the sink real quick so you'll notice that plants come in several different ways so you might get them to where they're already potted like this which is really quite nice because you can just anchor this whole thing down in the container and put rocks around it or you might see them in containers like this which I don't tend to like quite as much because the plants are not in water they just have like this little gel substance around the roots in fact let me open this up and show you because often times you want to take the plants completely out of the medium in here before you plant them in your jar and I'm not never really good at opening these things so I'm just gonna do it with scissors and try not to cut any of the leaves there we go so this one is called a java fern it's beautiful it looks pretty good a lot of times you'll see a lot of dead foliage that you want to clean off but you want to take them completely out of this interior pot as well so let's do that and this is gonna make a little bit of a mess okay so look at this you guys this is the kind of thing it's kind of like those soil moist crystals I imagined that these were something that like water was introduced and they sucked it up and then they kind of feed the roots of the plant while they're in their display case so now you want to completely rinse off the roots this looks like a really healthy looking root system here so I'm going to clean this off and take this to the sink and rinse all of the extra debris off the root system okay so I'm gonna plant this fern first what you want to do before you do any of the planting is you want to take the gravel out of the bags and you want to rinse them really really well till the water is running completely clear if you don't do that and you put the rock straight in your vessel it will make the clip water really cloudy and it's just not a good look you want them to look nice and clear like this so this is already pre rinse to gravel and you want to spread a little bit at the bottom of the jar so go ahead and do that and this is just a mason jar you guys so I think it's gonna look really quite cute to be mixed in with these other little bit more clean modern jars that I've got and then I'm gonna make a little well and you can make this you just want to make sure you know that the foliage has enough room to be done completely in the water if that's the type of plant you have which I'll talk about plant types here in just a second so I'm gonna make a well almost to the bottom here and then we'll introduce our plant in fact I actually think I put too much grab I'll hold on don't want to get carried away too much you can always add more gravel in and then the whole idea is just to kind of wait the plant down this this term might be a little bit too short so now that I'm looking at it I've got this fern all the way to the bottom of the jar basically and look at this the leaf still sticks up from the top so I think I need something taller hold on okay I've got a new jar got my little layer of gravel so now we'll try this again I'm gonna make a little well just big enough to wait the roots down and introduce the plant and then I'm just gonna try to shake the gravel a little bit so that it goes over the top of the roots it would have been easier with the mason jar cuz my hand doesn't fit in this one as well there I think that looks really good now you can add a little bit of water if you want to before this step but I prefer to do it this way it's a little cleaner so now we're gonna add our water now if you have tap water you want to fill up your container the night before and let it sit for 24 hours and let the chlorine evaporate from the water this is RO water and you also want to make sure that it's not too cold so what I like to do is fill up my container and then I just submerge it in a sink full of really hot water about this far and just bring that water temperature up a little bit because I tend to like to be between the 70 and 80 degree mark so they will live very happily inside with most of our indoor temperatures but they don't want that initial cold shock of water and so what I'm gonna try to do when I put the water in is I'm going to try to Bank it off the side of the jar so that it doesn't mess up or dislodge my plant just a nice steady stream and we're just going to fill it almost all the way to the top yep this is way better sighs wow that looks so neat so now at this point if you need to move your plant around a little bit happen to have my silverware drawer right here you can use any kind of tool that you can get down in there and you can move it around a bit if you need to at this point you can also drop like decorative items down in there so while being careful of the leaves drop that down in there and kind of place it that also helps weigh the roots down as well one more on this side cool I think that that one's done and like I said I do skip the charcoal step if I were to use the charcoal I'd be putting it under my initial layer of gravel all right so now let's pop this one I'm going to go ahead and put a little bit of gravel at the bottom like a little bit and then what I'm gonna do is I'm going to kind of hold the leaves with one hand and then pour gravel in around the container and basically I want to just come up level with where it's at most of these plants most of them that were putting in the gravel you don't want to bury the crown of the plant that's really important it's almost better to have a little bit of the root exposed rather than too far underneath the gravel because that hinders their growth so you can take these plants out of their little black container if you want to it's very easy to remove them they're just planted in rock wall so they just pop out of the container really easily but this one isn't really heavily rooted and I feel like it's just easier sometimes just to use them like this and then as they grow I can remove them eventually from the container once they need a little bit more root room at that point I'd probably need to bump them up in container size anyway here we go so far so good turn it around hope you guys can see through this glass it's so hard to film or get pictures of anything in glass because it's so reflective oh that looks really neat a couple of decorative rocks maybe just one no - and now water oops overshot that looks so neat I love it alright so now that I've got them all planted I wanted to talk a little bit about the plants I know that there are three different categories there's the plants called the true aquatics or submergent plants and they're the type that liked to be completely submerged in water like every single one of them that I have on this table right now which means that they're usually anchored down in gravel or sand and then all of their foliage is covered and so those are like Argentine sword ferns Java ferns other types of ferns java moss photo Neos water hyssop are some that I know of and then there's the second group called semi aquatics or emergent plants and they are the type that like to have their roots anchored in the water but all their foliage up above it so plants like of pothos sweet flag lucky bamboo umbrella papyrus cypress grass like a prince set or King Tut which I've grown out in the landscape before and they do like a lot of water so I think it'll be fun to try one of those I've got a perfect container to try Prince Tet next year and kind of treat it more as a water or pond plant and then there's the third category called floaters and they're the type of plants like just to float on the surface of the water like water lettuce or water hyacinths when you're picking out your plants you do want to make sure that you're picking out the right ones for the type of light that you have most of these will want between 12 and 16 hours of light every day which means you're gonna want to put them on a table near a really bright window or if you have the ability to put them under grow lights that's excellent as well I think it'd be really pretty to have one of these on a table with one of those really neat like curved lamps with a girl light shining down on it I think it would kind of spotlight the plant and give it the light it needs at the same time there are some plants that handle lower light I will put a list of those up on the screen so you can check those out if you have a more dim house and don't have very many bright windows one of those might be a better choice for you so now I want to talk a little bit about the maintenance of this type of plant and how I've kept mine looking good over the past three years so obviously they're in a very Stillwater sort of cysts situation there's no water filtration system no moving water so algae can build up on this type of plant you can use the product that I showed you earlier that's called sludge destroyer or pond saver that are just a natural bacteria that help keep your water clear I don't like to use those though I and I'd like to just clean mine out every few weeks so every two to three weeks I'll just pop my plant out put it in a little bowl of water on the side and then just drain everything out wash my rocks off just with water wash the container and then I put everything back in it's a super easy fast thing to do especially if you don't have seven of them like this might take me a little bit longer than it used to when I just had one but it's just such an easy maintenance thing and then I'm not having to introduce anything extra into the water they will require just consistent grooming so you know I'm looking at them all the time so if I notice any yellowing leaves or anything any kind of damage or anything I'll just make sure to clean those off so at that time usually I'll just pop them out and clean the rocks and clean up the plant and then put them back together and then monthly fertilization is important as well and I showed you that earlier so you just want to put a little piece of that fertilizer down in the rocks and I will do that one of the times I clean as well it's easier to kind of get it lodged in there and that will feed your plant and keep them nice and happy so that's it you guys these are my indoor water gardens I'm super excited and I think Russell is wanting to take a drink out of one of them probably and I'm excited to see how they all do I mean I've had a really great success with this one right here if you guys have any tips for me anything that I need to know that I don't know that I haven't shared please let me know down in the comments section because this is just kind of a trial thing for me and I just feel like it would be fun for us like if you guys want to try this project too would be really fun very inexpensive and very easy so thank you so much for watching this video and we will see you in the next one bye

Channel: Garden Answer

Views: 2,428,483

Rating: 4.8965921 out of 5

Keywords: Garden, Answer, Laura, Flower, gardening, gardener, beautiful, succulents, diy, grow, green, Proven, Winners, Fall, Winter, summer, spring, plant, planting, growing, plants, succulent, shrubs, shrub, bush, soil, dirt, earth

Id: PRoHErzVPyU

Length: 14min 39sec (879 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 19 2019