Vivarium Plants Masterclass | Round Table 5

um and then when it came down he's like all right i'm ready to ship it all right cool here's my address we ship them out and i got all kinds of stuff there were orange isopods there was like dalmatians there was albinos clowns and all these like i was just like cool man he looked it up so i just like emptied i just like through the whole containers and things and then he messaged me later that day he's like bro did you get the package i was like yeah he's like what was in it i was like i don't know a bunch of different types of isopods he's like was it the ones like clowns and i'm like yeah he's like oh dude that was like a 400 and was supposed to go to somebody else he's like i can't i can't get him back now i just emptied him in the tank he's like yeah another thing that i would advise against and i did it in a 12 12 18. pebbles oh you can buy a bag of pebbles um from home depot for cheap and my lord that was the heaviest tank i own and i had a fully bioactive 36 inch tall by 22 wide by 17 deep and the 12 by 12 by 18 was still heavier than it highly recommended like you're gonna see 10 times the amount of growth from your plant if you don't or if you have it opposed to not having it like you can even look up online where they've done like studies you'll see two patches which are like 10 feet apart one was watered in with a mycorrhizae the other one wasn't you'll see the plants three times the size wow that's amazing and before we get into the cool stuff let's talk about the really annoying hitchhikers fungus gnats being the biggest one and this is something that i regrettably didn't ask nick about when i had him on the podcast last time and i think we all suffer from this everybody listening to this who has tropical plants probably is there any solution to this or is it just something we have to live with these really annoying tiny little flies that just pester us forever welcome back to the animals at home network my name is dylan parent and you are listening to another round table session this is round table number five and today i'm joined by troy goldberg mike tytula and nick mark all three of my guests today have been on the podcast individually in the past so i'll put those episodes in the show notes as well so if you do want more information on each specific guest you can go there but today's episode as you can see it's a long one as most the roundtable discussions are we are discussing plants so in this episode we really do cover a lot of ground we discuss substrate and drainage layers lighting fertilizer type of water to use the best types of microfauna including the really annoying hitchhikers that often show up in planted vivariums such as fungus gnats and garden millipedes and how to get rid of those we discussed some of the best places to buy plants in both united states and canada and then we get into a little bit more depth and my guests list a bunch of different plant species that they use including how to properly plant epiphytes and climbing plants so they are successful and thrive and then at the end of the conversation we actually chat about how to have success with plants with larger reptile species so we don't solve that problem completely but we discuss a few different methods that could potentially be used in order to protect the plants from the reptiles destroying them and the last thing i'll say before we jump into the episode i have created a pdf sheet that goes along with this episode that lists a bunch of the different plant species that troy mike and nick like to use so that so if you're listening to this and you're like oh what did they say what species was that don't worry don't panic if you didn't catch a species or you don't know how to spell it it's all going to be listed on a pdf sheet for you and i just sort of broke them down into a few different categories so you can download that at the website it's in the show notes at animals at home network dot com just click on the round table header or in the show notes or the description on the youtube version of this episode so that might be something that you're interested in having so i just designed it very simple black and white so you can print it off without using too much ink and then there you'll have all the species and much more than were discussed in this episode all right without anything further here's my chat with nick troy and mike enjoy awesome well everyone welcome to this is round table number five i think and today we are going to take a dive into plants we've had a few episodes where we've talked briefly about plants obviously we had nick on a couple was at two months ago or a month and a half ago kind of getting into plants we're gonna try to go even further reptile keepers often are murdering plants and i think you know one of the things is i know from you three who take great care plants and have these amazing enclosures you get a lot of joy out of caring for them but i think most people get frustrated with them immediately and then gravitate towards just plastic plants because it's so much easier and they you know they don't really want to suffer through the ups and downs of caring for plants so before we get too far i'd like to just start with asking you guys why keep live plants with your animals either amphibians or reptiles and sort of what joy do you get out of that process is it is it the same sort of joy you get from caring for the animals or is it a little bit different so maybe we'll start with troy okay um well obviously for me it's a little different since i don't keep reptiles so they don't uh well i actually do have one reptile but it's very small um and it wouldn't ever damage any plants but so it's a little different in terms of the reptile keepers that constantly get their you know their plants are getting destroyed by them um so but for me you know i wasn't always into plants but um you know i i started like i don't know i'd see some of the european people's tanks and um you know just some of the enclosures around the world maybe like oh this those are cool i can i wonder if they i'd do well with them at first i was real intimidated probably like everybody else um just cause the cost back then i thought was expensive and now it's even it's it's bonkers it doesn't make any sense to me whatsoever um but uh you know so i just kind of started you know getting random plants here and there um some of my friends you know they had cuttings and i actually particularly i don't know about any other people that i actually uh rather would rather get cuttings than potted plants whenever i get potted plants i get a ton of die off and then a couple like it starts to get new growth like little by little but when i do cuttings it's just like immediately i don't even plant it i literally when people ask me like how do you plant uh microbials and tennis eye or how do you plant your aeroids i'm like literally dude i throw it in the tank i just throw it in just toss it in like the setups that we have with the automated misting the you know the my tanks will have that passive ventilation they're all plumbed so they drain so it's like i i don't have to do anything it's like i just throw them in there and they do well um so you know and then once that started happening i was like oh this is like i feel like we're cheating how all the all the house plant people and the reptile like they're enclosed like the climate and the habitats just not set up to thrive as much as the dart frogs um so it's like cheating yeah let her just throw it in and it grows okay and then if i you know to get stuff i wanted that i didn't feel like spending you know eighty dollars or a hundred dollars on back then just traded and um you know trade up same thing what i did with bart girls really um you know i bred the easy frogs in high numbers and then traded for a couple other rare species and then i read that and we just worked my way up so that's kind of how i i got into the plant game um but i i don't uh i'm sure mike will tell you because he's you know he knows all about the what makes the plant green i don't know dude i just give it light and water um so you know i don't claim to be a professional a botanist by any means but um i guess you could say i have a green thumb you know i don't kill much and most of stuff i have does thrive so that's yeah that's my take on it yeah and i think one thing that we'll do is uh oh sorry i'll let you jump in in a second mike is i think we can what we'll do is maybe compile like a list of plant species that you guys like because that was one of the things that people asked for like what species are good so after we record before the podcast comes up i'll make sure that i have maybe a pdf that i'll put together you guys can just fire species to me and i'll kind of compile a list but and mike why about for yourself i was i was just going to continue off troy's point and just say for troy it's especially for the dart frogs it's almost necessary uh the benefits to uh are to all reptiles but especially for dart frogs i mean you have like choice said the perfect habitat for all these species of plants so why wouldn't you and for me personally i know the original question was you know why do you keep live plants and what draws you to them and it's for me it's totally aesthetic i just like the look of live plants you can get so much variety there's different structures different growth habits different all the the differences you can find across the plant world and and then i mean secondarily to me uh it's the benefits to the animals you know there's the micro habitats it does produce oxygen humidity boosts it's there's a lot of factors that go into live plants that we can't even really detect in a reptile habitat but just knowing how specialized they have been for the last millions of years you know it's it's kind of hard to deny well the benefits and and what potential benefits they might have for the actual animals themselves yeah interacting with plants is literally a part of their biology and a part of their evolution so providing that is key and nick what about you yeah um really similar to mike like i love plants to begin with and they look really good in the tank they also provide a lot of enrichment for the animal like once uh the iguana in the back gets his big enclosure it's gonna be filled with stuff that doesn't mind being munched on by him but it also provides a lot of air filtration for the environment like when i was in school there was a study going on in one of the offices that was like where we filled it basically with around like 75 cents of area implants and i'm testing the oxygen levels inside and seeing how much it improved the air quality was really good and just adding that to a essentially just a closed box it's going to improve what the animal's actually breathing in the long term yeah yeah that makes perfect sense and you know it's funny because there you could make a giant list of benefits that live plants give and then you you know people go into the pet store and they buy those fake like you know ficus looking leaf silk type plants and you can only match one thing on the list from the benefits of live plants like they can hide in them and that's about it they don't even hold they don't even drip water well like a lot of those silk plants sort of absorb water so they don't do almost anything that that live plants do so there is a ton of potential so now that hopefully everyone thinks yes i gotta at least try this let's jump into some of just the basics because like i said people are usually pretty rough on their plants i think maybe the easiest place to start is soil and substrate i think you probably all have similar and nick and i talked about this a few weeks ago but maybe we'll start with troy again because i noticed that you had also tried out some some aqua soil as well so maybe you could kind of talk about the substrates that you use and or what you have used what you've had success with yeah um so i mean you know in 20 years i've used pretty much everything i don't think there's anything i haven't tried um you know from just straight cocoa fiber to sphagnum someone yelled at me for saying sphagnum i should say sphagnum moss um i say both it's weird but uh and you know i've used the abg mix atlanta botanical gardens mix um i've used turfis i've used clay i've used combinations of all and then i've used i've only used the aqua soil that hasn't even been set up for a year but um i have i mean i don't like you know as far as microfauna growth mold or anything like that like it's i don't see a difference from the aqua soil and like sand an avg mix i'm not seeing a difference there it's like both all the plants are doing well in both tanks um microphone is doing fine yeah i say microphone i'm sure some people just know that as bioactive um the bioactivities is just fine in there um you know but and then i've also used recently um that uh the sponge filter mat which is like the leasing you know i guess filter filtration for ponds and you know i guess aquarius all over use that stuff but i i really haven't noticed that i don't i mean i've got some comments on the aquas the the sponge filter mat like some people be like oh some of those plants are getting you know they look sort of yellow um like some of the airoids and the leaves like the old the old growth has turned it turns yellow and dies but then the new growth growth looks great and green and everything and like it's i don't know some people like comment on like instagram you're having i think it's called chlora something one of you guys probably know but um it's it's when the leaves are just not chlorosis that's it yes um and i'm just like you know i don't i don't prune anything i'm not trimming like i plant i just let it do its thing like i don't you know and i'm sure that happens in the jungle you know old growth dies and gets yellow and the new growth looks good i'm like like this isn't i'm not setting this up for a show at all times you know it's just these are for the frogs and just letting it do its thing but um i i honestly haven't noticed the difference but my three favorite i guess substrates are abg um i do like abg and turf is mixed um i do like the clay and i do like this the sponge filter mat troy do you want to explain what turf is because i don't know if everybody will know um so it's also it's like a they're like clay pellets yeah it's basically what they use on uh baseball diamonds that's literally what they use oh okay yeah like i i forget where i used to get i used to get at some like uh agriculture place yeah um they a huge bag um but it works well i mean mixed it i don't i don't know if like some people were using it back in the day to think that you know the frogs were absorbing some of the minerals from the clay but i'm not so sure on that i think the calcium the calcium bearing clay that people are using nowadays is definitely like uh it's like turfis on steroids i guess um way more benefits than that but it's also the calcium bearing clay can become quite messy and muddy in a superhuman wet environment so you i've been using it in like um in cups i make like little cups of it you kind of set them in a barbarian for frogs to go soaking but um yeah i guess to answer your question i'm i don't really see a big difference from abg uh the aqua soil that i use the ada aqua soil um or i think it was the i don't know if it's the amazon is it amazon amazonia okay because i next i messed up the uh amazonia institute tank and i called her the name of sonic and i get all right i don't know one of those two i got roasted for i was like look man i had a few too many to drink internet wizards got you they got me they got it i'll never let it down but um yeah i just don't really see you notice in those i i'd consider those like the premium higher-end substrates for amphibians and that's all i know but um yeah i don't really notice a difference of what's better than the other yeah you know they all drain well and they all get good growth so that's really what i look at yeah in some ways i think people tend to maybe overthink the substrate too much and they don't it's almost like analysis paralysis where they're just they don't know what to do and and i think we'll try to touch on a little bit of the arid stuff later which i know troy probably doesn't have as much experience but maybe mike and nick do because i know some people will be thinking about that as well but what about you two do you have any anything to add to that maybe we'll start with mike and then we'll go to nick yeah i think it's i mean i just agree with troy basically like the abg is probably the best i make my own mix uh tree fern has been really hard to get in canada previously uh i was gonna say is it a true true abg recipe it's not a true abg recipe no but we do have like where i work now we actually did get in a ton of tree fern fiber so i could make an abg recipe um but beyond that i i just kind of substitute the tree firm fiber with like orchid bark and stuff so it's still a relatively nutrient dense uh well draining substrate and it does really well i will be trying a troy method of the of the sponge foam and then um beyond that though i think it's also important to mention what not to use and please for the love of everyone do not plant plants in pure coconut fiber they will not do well hey potholes will do it true true well there's a will there's a way pothos will figure it out but beyond that it's it's pretty much useless so i mean there might be people out there that think you can do it and you might be able to do it for a month or two but in the end it will crash yeah so mike mike i was going to ask you do you plant many plants in abg itself like i myself i tend not to it's like the ground is abg and there'll be like a couple vines i start there but i don't i leave most of their grounders and my tanks are pretty bare it's like leaflet or moss and wood you know most of the plants i have they all climb the background and then it's like they just use the background over the wood so i was i was just wondering if like a lot of people you know i i yeah i did i planted like in my chameleon tanks i had the ficuses in there i had oh yeah um pothos i had a little pot of just basically sphagnum and pete with uh nepenties in there alright p um there was uh there's a lot of different like ficus uh schilferas that kind of deal so yeah i mean they grow well in it and nick did you have anything you wanted to throw on top of that as well um like basically for my uh idea for the substrate as long as it has the proper amount of nutrients and that it's not being anaerobic it will work fine like the biggest problem i'd see with most people especially when it's like coconut fiber a few isopods and apotheos it basically you get the coconut fiber which is essentially like it's inert it doesn't really have hardly any nutrients in it to begin with so when you throw the plant in there whatever carbohydrates it's living off about that point or what's going to carry it out and then that's where you get the plants that just crash so as long as you have a a decent like npk reading of your substrate then it's going to be fine yeah and that's the thing that i mean i made that mistake a long time ago when i first got my crested gecko i've had them for so long now but you know you go back 10 years cocoa fiber was like the golden thing they're like by the brick and it's just like this amazing substrate and it was the same sort of thing like i thought it was fine the pothos like we said they can survive in that because they're just like warriors it doesn't matter what the conditions are but when i started digging up the substrate eventually when i realized you start getting that anaerobic smell it's like sulfur methane you're like this is really bad and you know luckily the animal doesn't dig in it but had you been digging in it you'd have been just like gassing yourself so yeah you do want to have i i guess to so how do you figure out the nutrient the nutrient profile is it just easy just to get a reading nick or do you um yeah you can buy test kits that are relatively cheap that will tell you what you're sort of pushing out in terms of nutrients but for the most part if you're following like an abg mix or another recipe there's tons online as long as it has a high enough nitrogen phosphorous and potassium level in it most of your plant species are going to do quite well there are a standard like mpk value for a typical abg mix that you know of uh i'd have to look it up but i can't remember off the top of my head but okay what about what about yes are we gonna were you gonna sit on that uh nutrient side because i'll leave us there yeah yeah go for it i was just gonna ask nick i mean he would be a no more than i do um about like when i'm using this the sponge filter mat i mean that obviously has zero nutrients but i do i do cover it with live moss that's pretty much all i do and then i'm i'm just even like i have there's some pretty rare philodendrons and uh and theoriums that i've done really well with and all i'm doing is i just make a root ball with the sphagnum moss and i'm just pinning it to the background then it roots into the the moss and the sponge filter mat so like i would think that's not a whole lot of nutrients but it's probably not but again with a lot of these um steroids and philodendrons they're semi-epithetic so at some point in time they're going to start either up from a seed inside the tree and then branch down to the dirt or it's going to be they're going to climb up and then something's going to cut the vine so they're quite capable of going off of relatively low nutrient and then when you have like your cleanup crew they're going to break stuff down enough that the plant will be able to absorb the nutrient from whatever is available thanks and so what about depth what are you guys thoughts on on substrate depth i think this is one area where i think the hobby is going to start moving towards much deeper especially on the reptile side because it helps us maintain humidity but also gives the animal something to dig in and more space to root so i don't know if anyone has thoughts on that i can i'm the opposite unless i'm straight yeah i was gonna say for troy and for airoids and stuff you really don't need much i mean in choice case don't need any in some tanks um it's they're basically just gonna root into the background and and like nick said like the frogs will create waste and the rain will kind of wash that waste down and nick will know more about this than i do but airoids create specific um arboreal roots like roots to grab onto stuff and they're designed to have a higher affinity and actually draw in more nutrients from that water like passing over them in a short time so they don't have to be soaked in you know soil or whatever to actually absorb a lot of nutrients um for me it kind of alluded to it but it really depends on the animal i typically on average will make like three to four inch substrate um barriers i suppose of substrate depth so that's that's kind of where i max out but like in that chameleon tank when i had the trees and stuff in there it was like an 11 and a half inch substrate dam and you know an inch and a half or two inches of that was um drainage material like the lecca but other than that it was probably like eight nine inches of soil and the chameleons didn't dig in it at all and they were live bearers so they wouldn't even dig in for eggs either right but yeah you need that extra depth for for the roots and nick do you have anything on that one oh yeah it doesn't like it's very variable depending on what you're actually keeping and what plants are going in with your inhabitant so like again if you're if you have like a really burrowing species you're going to want a deeper substrate because it's going to benefit them in a number of ways but at the same time if you're growing plants with a species like that you have to be really selective because it's going to get ripped out of the ground but it's all up to what you what you're mixing and matching essentially yeah let me ask you what what average or what depth are you going to go for your iguana when you get its full tank or are you thinking you're going to go um is it just a green iguana yeah murphy he wants out of the tank right now he's scratching at the window but um probably i'm looking at doing because it's going to be a a decent sized enclosure that cohabs with the tortoises so probably a foot to two feet deep and then in there i'm gonna have planted pothos as well as um hibiscus species how big it's going to be probably depending on materials and whatnot but about seven foot tall by seven foot wide by five foot earth no seven foot by seven foot tall seven foot long and then five foot wide that's cool yeah that's huge and and that's the other thing with it with a deep substrate that's going to be like a couple hundred pounds of soil that's the other thing to consider so now that we've kind of discussed the soil and obviously one of the things i think you guys have mentioned but i'll just make sure i highlight is that ability for it to drain so whatever you're mixing making sure that it is has that sort of spongy airy soil to make sure the water is flowing through and then obviously the next step there is the drainage layer and i think we drainage layers are one of those things where i think people just put together and maybe don't think about it a lot because you know sometimes you see people on instagram they have a drainage layer and the water is like completely full and it's like bleeding up into the soil and you think okay this is not right so i think one of the biggest mistakes people make with the drainage later is not allowing the drainage layer to drain so maybe troy you could quickly discuss how you tackle that i think we all probably are similar as far as you know draining that layer but what do you do so yeah it's it's evolved again being in this for 20 years um you know i used to do you know the pvc you know risers and then egg crate and then you know the barrier and then your substrate um and i had those issues like you were just mentioning you know the water would get so hot so tall and then the substrate's completely waterlogged and i'd have to stick you know some sort of tube in there and siphon it out it worked um you know eventually that substrate would would dry out um but then you know a month and a half six weeks later um you know it's it's it's full again um and that just got to be a pain and i guess maybe i'm too lazy i don't like doing that so i started uh drilling my tanks with for a ball kit um and i just i it's all automated it just drains right outside of my garage all the tanks are tethered together which i wish i would have did it a different way i shouldn't every tank individually um just you know in terms of pathogens if since they're all tended together if i got something really bad like kitred in one tank it could potentially just transfer over to the other tank with water somehow if it was winter time and it wasn't draining out and they got backed up so i wish i would do it the other way when i move whenever i do move i'm gonna do it that way but um yeah everything's drained uh for it's pawn with bulkheads so um it's something i never have to worry about are they uh in the back in the back yeah so um i could do them on the bottom but the reason i don't because a lot of times i'm moving tanks by myself so i'm sliding it on the wire rack and when i did my 180 gallon tank i did drill the bottom and i just wasn't used to it and i had a big i think it was a one inch bulkhead and i had a big pvc pipe sticking out and then completely forgot about it when i did the background and when i flipped it back up just completely cracked and the bottom was supposed to be three eighths but the guy who made it we made it a quarter inch cracked completely cracked the whole bottom so i had to redo that um so yeah i think there's more more harm i guess you can have more damage more accidents more boo-boos whatever you want to call it when you do drain on the bottom um it's just easy to forget because i feel like the tank is more upright so than on its back yeah i don't even turn tanks on their back anymore to do the backgrounds i just do them vertically um so that's why i drilled them in the back and yeah it's just it's just something i never have to worry about is siphoning or the substrate getting waterlogged i never have to worry about it so that's kind of what i do with that does anybody else want to jump in on that can go off you want i i can i have something to say but i'll let nick go if he wants yeah that's basically or not the site earth i've been siphoning with my previous tanks where i just have a drainage layer of lava rock for like two inches and then i'd have like a pop bottle that i cut in half and then kind of stick it in the corner and then i just use that to draw it all out every once in a while yeah yeah that's that's another way it just takes a little more maintenance i guess yeah yeah and then another way is another pvc tank or like pvc tube or i use like a thicker uh one inch just drainage hose like from anywhere that you can buy for your aquarium or a three-quarter inch it might be but you can just stick that in the corner and it's kind of inconspicuous and it goes all the way down to the bottom you can just put a little airline tubing in there and drain it out that way um more recently though it's just more limited misting and kind of balancing out the misting cycles obviously if you're doing like a rain chamber or or the big tank you see behind troy like that's not feasible so uh you just gotta kind of make your own solution to that whether it's in the back the side or just built into the tank but it does where it is crucial to have an actual drainage area and a method to drain that drainage area yeah it's not enough just to have it yeah i have i have one more thing to touch on drainage layers um you know if someone asked me what what should i do for a drainage layer i think the one thing i would point them away from like like lava rocks fine uh lika or hydroton that's fine um the sponge filter mat is fine but i would advise against what i used to do with the pvc riser and the egg crate mainly for springtails because springtails they get under and they float on the water and so they're just sitting i mean you'll you're like where's all my microphone you're looking in a tank you see a little bit but not much and then you look on the side there's just a gazillion of them just floating in the water and they the only time they're able to get back up on top of the land is when you flood it basically um so having like lava rock or lika or anything like that they can always crawl back up on you know they can get out of the water basically they're not just suspended they're underneath the substrate they can come up whenever if you put you know bug burger or banana or some sort of food in there for them to eat they will come back up um which is nice so that's why i'd say i would advise against the egg crater riser and also i think it looks terrible when someone doesn't cover it and you just see this like white pvc thing you're like yeah dude just cover it with black lion or something oh it's god awful um yeah i'm way you know i'm super into like aesthetics that's kind of one of the reasons i talked about not using a deep substrate like i think the a smaller substrate like a substrate dam on the tank and taller doors it just it looks so much nicer um than you know a six to eight inch you know substrate damn and then the tank's only 24 inches tall you're like it looks super stubby i don't know it's not just my personal opinion but um yeah another thing that i would advise against and i did it in a 12-12-18 pebbles oh you can buy a bag of pebbles um from home depot for cheap and my lord that was the heaviest tank i own and i had a fully bioactive 36 inch tall by 22 wide by 17 deep and the 12 by 12 by 18 was still heavier than it like keep that in mind when you're building it because i i'm lifting it up to the shelf what was say uh what was the drainage layer that it's not made anymore i used to love it or uh no it's it's like lava rock but it's white why can't i think of it featherstone no um it's made from glass it's like i know exactly what is it it looks like perlite but it looks like it looks just like it i like can i think of it i thought perlite wouldn't i'll look for i used to use it all the time they stopped making it i guess because the company that made it got in trouble with the irs or something like big time so they it's no longer made um why i can't i hate that i can't think i used to get it from rizzo um or amazon used to sell these huge bags if i didn't feel like paying with mike wanted me to pay him but um what what was it mike come on now you know what i'm gonna text steve well and i think the clay balls are really the best because they are light and they're pretty cheap to buy and i think some people don't realize people i always people messaging where do you find those one place you can buy them is actually ikea now you can't buy huge bags but if you need a little bit ikea actually sells them but most hardware stores sell them as well as or like garden stores as well as like any grocery shop will sell you like a dog food bag size of of clay balls so and that kind of raises another point what clay or what troy was saying is it's nice to have an enclosure where you can visually see the drainage layer as well so maybe if you do cover it in vinyl have a place where there's like a window where you can see it maybe around the side it's not going to ruin the way it looks aesthetically but to be able to monitor it visually because you don't know if it's draining properly and i think that maybe even have you can make a tank i guess maybe that had a really deep substrate layer that was completely blocked so maybe it didn't have that stubby look but you know so it didn't look like a stack of soil with a little bit of window i'll intentionally leave the signs exposed yeah yeah i'll interject with an answer when steve gets back yeah yeah oh and then we'll all sit there like it's on the tip of my tongue it is not on the tip of my tongue i will be surprised uh it was it was awesome because it was it was lighter than the hydroton or the late lika and um so it was lighter in weight and there was it was not just round balls it was like kind of looked like rocks um but uh yeah it was it was awesome for microfauna and it it you know it was like white in color at first but then after the tannins and everything from the drainage it turned it so you didn't have to really cover it it looked like a natural stacked like substrate like what you would see um so yeah you didn't even have to really cover the front which was nice on it well biodude sells something that's like a white drainage layer and it's kind of like a perlite type material so i wonder if that's sort of the same type of thing it probably is yeah um it may be called something else yeah well you know with any call stuff all kinds of different things yeah i'll look i'm like do you have bio shots uh we have them at where at work you use them no all right that's for another podcast try okay okay okay well as we wait for the drainage layer answer maybe we'll move on to lighting because that's another area where i think people throw a small uv lamp on and their plants burn up and die so as far as maybe we'll start with nick is there anything special for lighting that that you use or are you just kind of open to a bunch of different things i've tried pretty much everything you can and i'd say that using like i know shop led lights work really well if you're on a budget the more professional grade grow lights are obviously going to be much more effective but with that you're going to have also a pretty nice price tag on it too but definitely like with my grow tanks what i'll do is take the um 600 kelvin um little led bulbs and i'll actually cut the the plastic off of it which um shows it and then basically it's bright enough to you do all of your growing needs that's like a budget one but that's a regular bulb that you just remove you remove the outer layer of it yeah just dremel off the top of it which is just a plastic covering which just diffuses light and then you get all the little led diodes that you can see and then it's plenty bright enough to grow most stuff okay interesting yeah that's definitely a cheap method and what about troy what do you use um so i again i've used a ton of different things for the frog room i definitely use the led shop lights because i'm lighting i don't know 30 somethings um and i've had great results of them and vermilions you know they turn red um when they're you know really when they're up higher um most of my plants stay really green and moss grows well so yeah that's all i'm looking for um and i just buy the i think i use the 6 000 kelvin 6500 to me a lot of depending on what brand or whatever you get a lot of them look too blue to me and i just it's just not something i prefer i like more of a pure white or even whitish yellow but i don't like the dingy yellow like the 5000 is way too yellow even 5500 but uh 6000 is kind of the sweet spot i like um and and yeah so that's what i use on all my frog room tanks um i do have a couple from spectral designs or i think is the name uh it's it's whoever the institute you know the institute tanks they supply them um it's a nice light it's very bright the the light gets you could cook definitely cook eggs on it it's super hot which i don't like um it kind of makes me nervous sometimes i turn it down to like a quarter or a half away because when it's on full blast i mean i can't keep my hand on it for three seconds it's like i'm getting third degree burns wow um my 180 gallon tank i have t5 high outputs um and it was it was a grow light it used to come in a discreet box because it looked like you were growing pot so um that company is no longer in business but that that fixture is amazing my buddy josh moore used to use it he's the one who turned me onto that and the the ballast has like this reflector in it which makes it look like there's like 40 bulbs like it's a crazy reflector um but it grows i've had awesome growth in that tank um i've used you know the jungle dawns they're okay i think they're wildly overpriced um tink man herps leds i have used those again wildly overpriced it's like those things are like 40 50 bucks and you literally on me i feel like i was using two per tank it's like a hundred dollars to light a 30 30 to 40 gallon tank is outrageous when i'm using i'm getting you know i'm using basically for a whole rack the four tanks i'm lighting for like sixty dollars and so in the frog room that's why i use the led shop like but yeah yeah um i think i think people definitely over overlook the lighting in terms of for the frog i mean you know the frogs don't need it so but if you're growing plants you know that's why nick and nick would know a lot more than as far as the actual plant growth and mike what do you use or what do you have you played with um i've kind of run the gambit like troy said arcadia they have a really good spectrum and they grow plants really well and they are really bright as you know dylan um oh yeah but again it's for like a 12-inch uh led it's something like 80 canadian something around there so it's wildly expensive for what it is and i mean yeah they're they're good but a lot of people are also you know why and uh i got sent the exoterra bulbs and they're good they're not super super bright but they actually do grow plants and i know i made a video on it um and it wasn't curling up any bromeliads or anything but since then i've just kept the light running on it and it actually has started to color up for miliad so um for 35 canadian which is like 27 american or something like that um they're good bulb they are short though so it's really you're gonna need three or four if you have a long 30 40 gallon whatever yeah um i've also used the skylight leds and they are again very bright and they work really well um beyond that uh t5s they the benefits of a t5 over the leds is they diffuse the light really well so i know like if you're into like the uh saltwater hobby or whatever you'll you'll hear the kind of debate of you know what's better led or t5 because t5 gives a much more uniform light and creates more natural shadows than the leds where it's more of a spotlight over top and creates really harsh shadows so it kind of depends what you're looking for uh troy like troy said i mean the 6500 to 6000 kelvin is kind of where you want to be at um and then i mean the the the par value of the light is what you actually need to look at to kind of tell how well it's going to grow plants or how strong the light is but most of us don't have a parameter so yeah it triggers stones that's what growstones yep oh growth stones that's what they're pressed does steve said it was also pumice not glass i think mike rizzo was telling me it's glass he told me the whole story on how wherever it was made but i think it may have even been in michigan because i thought perlite was glass but maybe i'm way off there i don't know it's just basically expanded rock in a volcano oh okay of course the wrong world and i think fairly kind of breaks down doesn't it oh yeah it does like you could just pop it with your hand it turns into dust it's horrible that's why that's the difference of gross ones you couldn't do that with i mean grow stones some you'd get dust from it but they they held up i mean you could put you know 40 pounds of weight on it in that dream it doesn't matter right that's why you can't really do the perlite and as i have i have like a a monster bag of perlites been sitting outside of my garage so i thought it was the same just the same stuff and i messaged grizzo and he was like no dude you can't yeah and every time you pick up that bag it probably makes a cloud of dust like i have one too i'm like oh i'm going to use this it's so cheap and now it's like i can't even touch it without creating a dust storm dammit this stuff yep yeah exactly exactly i looked at the the biodude media the stuff that he uses is actually just turfis yeah mike i was gonna ask you um did trey show you that uh that glass speaking on light um that glass with that uvb penetrates it's it's insane yeah awesome yeah it's beautiful and i like i'm getting it is it i think it's is that the four silicate or something yeah glass that actually allows uv to penetrate it and it it didn't actually filter out that much i'm not sure the thickness or anything like that i think it's uh i think i think he got eight three millimeter i think it was two millimeter yeah so eighth inch yeah so um it was uh it's insane though he he tested it and like threw through nothing filtering it i forget like at the top it was like 31 or something and then it was really high he needs to chill on the light bulb it's like i said to him he sent me a video and i was like i mean besides the fact that that uvi reading literally doesn't exist on earth it's cool so is it just a piece of glass that we'll use as a as a lid or yeah so basically so in in tanks where like you know it's kind of an issue for so he was saying certain chameleons that you you want to have the high humidity but they need that uvb and it's like it's so hard to you know with your house you know whatever the ambient room temperature and humidity is to keep that tank at the right humidity because you need the screen to have the uvb and he's like you know this you could literally do uh you know a 90 glass top with a little bit of screen for just regular filtration and they're going to be able to get that uvb from it and it's it could change i see it as a big game changer for for reptiles that you know people are using screen tops for that reason but they're trying to keep humidity in for dark frog people a lot most of us don't need like really strive to use the uvb but even that said you know now you can use uvb for dart frogs and i know you do anyway so you won't have to stick the tape the door closed and shove the little lamp in there it works it's unfiltered uvb they love it let me get off my back so is that is that something that's that's not available yet right is that something that product that's being tested or what is it you can buy borosilicate glass is from places it's i don't know what his plans are with it or what the whole deal i think he's going to be he's planning on bringing a bunch in just i think so so yeah um yeah but this is my buddy trey who's kind of notorious for finding a really cool product and then like saying he's going to bring it in and then there's like doesn't it's like oh okay i made a video on that yeah yeah yeah but you can wait on this you can buy it from other glass places it's not cheap like yeah i bet yeah obviously there's you know there's the there's the high iron like green looking glass there's the low iron really high quality glass this is starfire here that's starfire nice that's what the doors are for people that don't know that's the really low iron glass and it basically just has higher clarity and more fidelity to actual uh like to your eyes perception essentially i don't think it's worth the mo i mean that the doors it was 278 dollars for my doors i didn't realize that i thought they were going to be like 100 rather than like 40 and they were like yeah 270 i was like okay here you go good lord um but yeah i don't think it's worth the money because you really only see it on the edge so it like on the sides if you wanted it to be really clear or like if you got really thick glass on the aquarium i think it'd be worth that but um you know on for what i'm doing i was like yeah that's kind of a silly silly decision but live and learning that's interesting yeah that's right one other thing i want to as we're sort of sitting on light here you're talking about i think all three of you have mentioned that using the proper light you get these bromeliads to color up and whatnot so nick maybe could you talk a little bit what's going on there is that an intensity of light that allows those to start purpling up or what's the deal with with that yeah so to my understanding it's um basically most plants will have some form of natural sunscreen so when you're getting bromeliads and different cactuses will do this too they'll basically just color up and that's a way to protect their chlorophyll from actually getting burned up in that like i've had the mistake when i first started growing bromeliads in a tank i've actually burned the leaves because of how close they were to the light oh boy that was an iguana jumping on the mic for anyone listening yeah so it's it's basically to my understanding form of sunscreen and the higher intensity the light will be the more coloration you're going to get from your bromeliad okay yeah so that's just like the pigments building up in the leaf too to protect and so i guess that would be an intensity of light and because when you're saying you're burning leafs up was that from the heat or was that from being too close to uv or uh that was just under an led light actually so it's like just from whatever factors were going on with it it didn't feel or the plant felt that it was getting burned somehow and basically a bunch of i believe the oh look i think it's anthocyanin is what is the red coloration it's the same stuff that are in um tree leaves in the fall time but yeah i actually remember that my miners in bio are in botany basically but it's been a long time since i've accessed that let's try and make some fun with somebody else there you go yeah i'll tell you mike as far as watering goes this is a pretty basic question is there you know there's different ways you know missing and whatnot we don't necessarily have to go into how you're procedurally doing it does anybody using special water or distilled water or is anything maybe troy with your misters are using distilled water to make sure you're not getting calcium buildup on the glass or i have an ro unit um so i use reverse osmosis water for the mist thing and then i use uh i've recently switched over i used to use ro water on tadpoles but i i think it was too pure or something so i started using uh spring water for tadpoles just so they could have more minerals okay um i've seen a little boost but yeah with plants um i use ro water all the time what about anybody else somebody else use anything special or just tap water or whatever i used to use our water as well but since moving out here we don't have an ro unit so i just use standard do you have a missed water or are you just missing by hand um we have like a giant one sec for those of you for those of you watching i'm holding up a giant like like a pesticide orange highlighter orange yeah pesticide mister um i do have two miss kings waiting to be still set up but i need to get the actual final tank or try shaking his head but uh yeah i got two miss kings just sitting in the back waiting for the new tank why won't you set it up i just don't get it because it's gonna change so much will you run ro through there through them i don't know hopefully but probably not to be honest you would yeah those those misking nozzles that little that little screen filter in there it's stupid it comes up yeah it comes up really fast um i mean i coming up even with my ro it still comes up wow and i change my oil filters like every three months i change them all wow yeah really i mean i'd like to find a way and there is like a water purification system that bree's parents have so i might be able to find a way to just kind of do what troy does and have it run into like a tank and then turn on an automated pump to fill the reservoir but that that'll i'll have the mister set up long before that happens so you don't have any any running water in the basement we do we do so just get in our that's just set up in our unit through there it's so easy you get it all you'd have to do is literally you could run your mist king directly from the reservoir that's what i used to do in the house i had a 37 gallon trash can with a float valve and so right after like the sink the you know those little drop sinks by your laundry or whatever downstairs yeah um i just had the water go through the ro and go right into the 37 gallon reservoir and then it would you know once it's built the float would stop the road from turning on and i had my miss king pumps plumbed right into that reservoir and i ran all the lines through my house so it's like i never had to refill anything or do it was just that's what sucked moving out to the garage i have no running water out here so that's why i have to get a rig that that pump to pump water out here which sucks but um yeah that's if you have access down there i'm jealous of you like super jealous i would i would ask that tips from you when the time comes asap it's so easy just one less thing you have to ever do yeah i had this mister from that i bought a couple years ago i bought it from like aliexpress so it came right from china and it was i was like oh it's like 50 or 45 dollars it's so much cheaper than the miss king i'm just gonna buy it so i bought this thing and it it only lasted about 14 months before it just stopped working and now i have a miss king but the biggest thing was the sound of this this pump it was it literally sounded like a machine gun going off in my in in this reptile room every couple times a day and i had no idea like i was like i guess that's just how loud you know diaphragm pumps are but then the miss king is like i'm like listening for you you can't even hear it i cannot believe how quiet they are it's just so much worth the money they get always like random rack like it's sitting under a rack or whatever and it hits and goes yeah yeah yeah you gotta make sure yeah yeah they'll get noisy if you uh if the reservoir runs dry yeah and then when you put water back in when they start like spawning i do it all the time and i get pissed at myself um but yeah when they run dry they're they're noisy after you the next time you go to use it oh okay yeah so far i haven't let it about three to five days yeah nothing like the old one though people would be like in my living room they're like what is that what's happening in there uh nick on water um it depends again on what plant you're growing like most of my plants i just use tap water because ours is fairly good right here um carnivorous plants definitely you want to use really low mineral content stuff yeah even for some of the bromeliads because if you think about where they're getting their water straight from rain it's not being drawn up from the roots like you would a plant that's sitting in the ground but yeah most of the time tap water is good as long as it doesn't have an extreme mineral content in it okay so we had touched on i know a lot of people aging age water yeah aged uh tap water they like oh it's like tap water and then just set it out for three or four days just in case uh it's basically to release all the chlorine yeah chlorine evaporates yeah yeah and then it only really needs to sit out for like 12 to 24 hours it doesn't actually need to stay out for too too long but yeah so we were talking about the soil con or the nutrient content of soil before and so one question that people you know i posted a question on instagram the other day to see if anyone had plant questions and one that kept coming up was fertilizer i think people get very afraid of fertilizer because they see it as poison and but i think there are safe ways to use it as well so i don't know does anyone use fertilizer here with with their plants no i have foreign i do like depending on what it is i'll use um you can do compost tea which is gonna be the safest for your animals so essentially that would be um if you have say a worm farm or whatever it's all the drainage that these worms produce and it's going to be filled up with all the um all the broken down stuff you've been feeding them in the compost bin is that worm castings and then it's uh it's a little bit different so it's basically your worms are gonna be pooping which is the worm castings but the all the juices that the worms produce and excrete from their bodies it's um it's basically a urate of sorts or urine it's all you're going to have just a bunch of bacteria that are really beneficial in there and really i believe it's really high in nitrogen so it's really good for your growth phase of your plant which makes it really green and bush and then you just dilute it with a certain percentage of water and it should be safe for your animals because it's not like it's a chemical fertilizer which are like straight nitrogen mixed with a ton of salt and all these other chemicals yeah do you use anything that's not just the worm pea oh yeah for sure on basically any of my plants that aren't in with animals they get a regular fertilizer okay and then it'll be just on a regiment of whenever i notice that the plant needs some but if it's in with animals you wouldn't you wouldn't do anything other than the worm waste like it like it's probably not going to hurt your animal to extreme i wouldn't use it with amphibians for sure because of how porous your skin are like a lizard would probably be okay as long as you're not munching on where it's getting watered in on a weekly basis yeah i mean i know in some of my old tanks i haven't done it recently at all but i'd actually just use the like fertilizer spikes and push them into the soil and and use that and that that was when i had like the ligo doctorless williams eye and some of the other tanks that i had excuse me running and i saw no ill effects from it so it's kind of something that you have to research yourself and interpret how much risk you either want to and you know expose your animals to or not i know compost teas you can also just use straight up compost and literally brew it like a tea and let it sit for a while and and it'll get those beneficial bacteria and have similar amounts of nutrients as well um but if you're if you're not making your own compost i'd be a little sketched out by it especially for a reptile tank just based off you know what were those uh what was that compost being made from yeah you know when you're throwing in your bell peppers and some lettuce and stuff you're like cool whatever but who knows what those commercially produced composts are made from um and then i also occasionally will do like a foliar feed as well so i'll basically just mix up some organic um fertilizer and like a spray bottle and just spray down the tank a little bit uh most of the time uh there i think there is a dyna girl one i just use like a standard fertilizer and i don't even know if it's all that effective nick you can chime in there but [Music] um she's busy she's working like yeah she's working in the room yeah not building tanks okay so i think we've covered a lot of the basics which is good i do want i i do want to mix in some error to talk just because i know there's aired people listening that are probably like please tell me something so maybe we'll mix in just a little bit now because i do want to get into microphone as well we'll do that next but as far as errod goes are there any of the tips obviously substrate probably is one thing that would differ but what else would differ from from an arid substrate or not an air substrate air tips as far as the basics go so maybe nick did you want to start i'm not sure if there's anything you want to add to it yeah um for that i'd basically you'd want to do like selective watering because like most of the time in your tropical setups you're going to be misting down the entire tank and everything's going to be getting soaked but with air and stuff especially if you have like really desert loving species of lizards or whatnot that don't need to be like blasted with water it's going to be a lot more beneficial if you just spot water the plant and the corner because they're gonna need a lot more water in that setup too because you're basically just you have a hot box where it's gonna be constantly perspiring losing water from the heat lamp and the uv lights and all that sort of thing so giving it a weekly water just in that area is going to be a lot more beneficial okay not just to kind of touch on what nick said there and my personal philosophy with a lot of the more arid species that we keep i haven't really looked into like the science behind it but at least in my head it makes sense so um i think a lot of arid species we keep dry as a bone i.e uromastics leopard geckos even that kind of deal actually would benefit from a little bit higher humidity or at least a uh like a humid hide essentially because you think about it if they dig into the corner of a mountain and they're defecating in that area that will raise the humidity and i know that um dave kaufman made a video of him looking at aki monitors in the wild and he's holding the humidity probe out here and it's like 13 humidity and then he finds like a hole basically like an accupro and like digs a couple inches into it and sticks it in there and it's like 90 humidity so i think it is important to raise that like with and how that relates to nick is that i actually just water my entire tank like my entire leopard gecko tank as a whole uh and yeah it kicks up the humidity for three four days but you know then it kind of levels off down to the 30 40 whatever it levels off to um but definitely nick has a good point in watering as far as substrate tips go i personally use the arcadia earth mix arid i know there are other options and you actually can't find that in in the states so um there are other options you just want to make sure it drains really well peat moss sand mix is typically okay uh you can mix in some like worm castings as well if you want to add some nutrients and such uh as far as plant choice goes you're going to really want to stick to succulents and and arid like conditions that you don't want to throw those might not go in there [Laughter] just because of the heat and you know water loss basically uh so that's that's one thing that you really want to consider there are a lot of really robust growing succulent like plants even some pepperonis do okay in uh or are very like succulent like so that's basically just go to the succulent section and anything you like try it out i don't i don't have any specific species off the top of my head but yeah yeah no that that is good i think um i think you're right about people you're reading those just general humidities of those areas and thinking oh it's only 12 or 20 here that means that everything has to be dry and i think beardie vet did something as well where he went and kind of dug a hole and found like 85 humidity and maybe we were talking about the before nick i forget but yeah so it is important to have that those ecological niches or environmental niches i assume troy you probably don't have much to say on the aired side no nothing like what is a reptile yeah hey i have one man what what did you get a morning gecko slipped in your tank uh hold on a second it's a ghana toadies something oh wow okay i don't know that's like a rare micro gecko so is it i've never heard of that it's like the yellow headed one yeah gonototes uh i'll find the species name yeah uh my buddy in cleveland i brought some frogs up to him and uh he was like hey i packed this pack this up for you uh i was getting some he works at uh well like just don't worry about it but um he had something i was picking up and i can't really say but he was like uh he's like here i packed the sport and i was like oh what's this he's like uh it's a lizard i was like oh god okay my friend was gonna make fun of me now cause i've always said i'll never have a reptile yeah common name is the yellow headed gecko and the species is going to toady's elbow gullaris [Music] those of you watching i'll try and do my best to show like a little picture of it oh over here nope you did something mine doesn't look like that yet because it's like really young oh wow that's amazing i've never seen that it's like a blue gecko with an orange or reddish head yeah dart frogs or yeah i've gotten in with my old pock victorious um i've seen it like maybe like i thought i killed it for sure um but i saw it like last week i've only i've only ever seen him at night um right before i'm like lights are basically out and i'm just like going around checking stuff and i'm like oh hey there you are he's just always up top um and i talked to the guy i got it for music yeah that's pretty much the only time i see mine too so cool there it's and mine's just a juvenile it's very small so but yeah i've got a reptile so that's all i can say about reptiles that you have i have so let's jump into microfauna and i think before we get into the cool and i'm gonna throw in uh oh did we lose nick for a second oh he's back he froze on my side and i want to throw in into a fungi fungi mushrooms in here as well nick so we'll fold this into uh microphones i know that's something you want to talk about before we get into the cool stuff let's talk about the really annoying hitchhikers fungus gnats being the biggest one and this is something that i regrettably didn't ask nick about when i had him on the podcast last time and i think we all suffer from this everybody listening to this who has tropical plants probably is there any solution to this or is it just something we have to live with these really annoying tiny little flies that just pester us forever so maybe nick did you want to jump on that first and then we'll kind of go around yeah so they are hard to get rid of they they thrive off of moisture and the fungus gnats larva actually feed on plant roots and basically the the easiest way to get rid of them is to dry out the tank as much as you can and then i've had it where they've just kind of petered off and they're no longer existent in the tank um another way you can do it is if you like it's more beneficial if you have like micro geckos or dart frogs they'll feed on them occasionally but other than that you're kind of stuck with them unless you like kind of nip it in the butt as soon as you have like confirmation that they're there interesting yeah maybe like a little yeah micro gecko cohab into some of these setups would be would be a huge you know i find that when i first set up a an enclosure there's like a big bloom and it does kind of fade away but there's like three months where it's just like my wife is just about to kill me like they're all over the place they like get into your cup when you're drinking it's just horrible and mike what about you um so similar experience like as some people if you've tuned in i moved in with my with my girlfriend's parents and they we now have a lot of house plants and there is a huge problem with with um the fungus gnats and same deal it's like getting in their wine getting in my coffee like they're everywhere um if it's not in a tank setting or if the tank is empty like you're kind of waiting for the the i guess like the new tank syndrome to kind of fade away um then you can use i've heard i haven't actually tried it yet because we don't have any more right now but i've heard that you can use the mosquito bites and dilute it in water and then water through that and it kills the larva so you might have to do that a couple times just to make sure all the larvae are dead and the adults are all so bad a pesticide or mosquito bites is that what that is yeah it's like it's used for ponds and stuff so they okay it basically just kills the larvae and pawns but part of me mosquito dunks is what they're called oh dumb um and then you can use that uh you can also nick correct me if i'm wrong but there's also predatory mites that eat the larva too oh yeah that's true yes um not oh what's the name is it like high slop or hassleop or there's hypoaspis mites that are like a predatory mite i don't know if that's the species though i think it might be hypo are they attracted to the same type of things root flies no not as much no yeah it's just the they're attracted to like yellow that's why those sticky tape things work really well and i actually have those in a few of my tanks like in my turtle tanks i have that i used it in my chameleon tank as well when i first set that up um and obviously make sure it's safe make sure your animal can't get to it like think of the craziest possible way it could get there and move it away yeah like if there's any way it can get there it will get there and it will get stuck yeah because they're so sticky yeah they're insane it is okay is it hypoaspas miles those will kill your your clean up crew as well though right those will start eating away your tails and whatever yeah they're generalist might predators so anything that they can grab they're going to kill yeah so if you do that if you if you release predatory mites in and they take care of the net the gnat population they also kill your cleanup crew can you eventually reintroduce a cleanup crew and have some success or those going to be there forever you can but it's gonna take probably because mites will also they can go dormant if they run out of food and a suspended animation kind of thing but you'd probably have to wait wait a few months before trying to reintroduce a cleanup crew like they won't attack isopods but you're not going to have any springtails left after yeah um something i did want to mention that came up is the micro geckos and stuff i have a like a tank for i guess a tub full of morning geckos and they're babies so they're tiny tiny tiny little geckos and they do not go after the fungus snacks um i've even like i'm sure if my dart frog like my familial came across it it would eat it but i still noticed some in her tank as well so even predators like that might not be savvy enough to catch them um beyond that though i had one other thing to say about the fungus yeah yeah you have not much i mean there's definitely times where a tank will go through like a little bloom and but they don't bother they seem to just stay in the tank they never want to come out and then a week or two later they're like you know i'll see like a couple and then they're just they're gone and then it may come back if i reintroduce a new plant or something or the tank goes through some sort of new cycle nothing like my stuff's all automated but from being out in the garage the climate change has such an effect on the humidity out here and in the tanks um that that my tanks yeah it's it's a wild cycle they go through and the season seasonal changes um compared to when i was in the house so yeah i think that may have some effect with the fungus gnats but yeah i have times where they're crazy in the tank and then it just seemed to teeter out after a couple weeks and obviously never like a real yeah i was just saying obviously you're not drying anything out so i guess the dart frogs are probably eating them so that that definitely helps yeah yeah mike did you have anything else in that like i kind of no it's not coming back to me okay are there any other annoying hitchhikers that fungus gnats are the worst i don't know if there's any other ones that are within that lines and you have one there is worse flips way worse yeah yeah yeah thrips uh there's i mean basically you think of like common yeah snails are a really bad one too specifically those are mostly in like dart frog tanks because it is such high humidity part of me greenhouse millipedes yeah i have those as well oh me too yeah yeah see the green light i can kind of live with because yeah you can control the population really easy so if anyone has these they will they'll kind of explode but you can just put like a cucumber or carrot or something and then come back in the morning and it's just like a horrible mess of them and you can just like over a few days you can cut the population back really easily but and they are a pretty effective cleanup crew what's that they are i was saying nammer teens are annoying too are those little worms yeah yeah it was like slimy worm things mike i called him the meridians and you yelled at me and said it's name or teens nope definitely it was just not me i swear yes it was i said we were playing fortnite and i said i i said the meridians you were like the what and i was like the meridians you're like you mean nammer teens okay all right dude i don't know just like you called vans only eye vancolini you called you caught him vancouver what are you talking about dude yeah mike you definitely corrected me on this i promise you okay well you were right the first time good job so those are those can you just can you say it one more time properly and then whichever way it was supposed to be set and then and then describe what it is i've always said meridians um and they are they are they're not parasites are they aren't they a flatworm yeah they're they're weird yeah yeah and they they will destroy microfauna um they have like they shoot out like a little probe they just they'll fruit flies so you usually see them on glass at night they come out on the doors and at the top wherever the flies are sitting and they'll just pick them off but they will they live in the substrate during the day you'll see an occasion occasionally in the glass during the day but um yeah they will wipe out um not so much isopods but they will wipe out my springtail like populations pretty wildly i don't really know how to get rid of them again just naturally it seems like my tanks go through blooms and it's normally from i usually seem to notice them and snails from leaf litter if i don't if i don't bake my leaf litter or nuke it i usually soak it in water and then microwave it for like five minutes if i do that i don't have snail or um the meridians blooms but um yeah if i don't do that then snails are a big problem i've lost a few dark frogs from eating snails and i think the snails had um nematodes they would that's how they were getting them um and i've lost all the dark thoughts from that just like but yeah snails are a big problem but snails you can kind of control with bananas and stuff too they'll if you put a banana in the tank the snails are gonna nuts on those yeah you just have to get rid of them every day but so the flatworm species it's a terrestrial species of flatworm um when i had them i think they were from the genus um rancodemus and i think they're like rancodemas sylvatica or something like that like it was i think that's right yeah um and they they won't really harm your frogs or anything like that from what i know at least but they will decimate your cleanup crew they will also eat like fruit flies and stuff like that like they they're kind of cool in a way but at the same time it's they're kind of unsightly and and yeah gross so they're like brown and like pink i don't even yeah they're just nasty if you've yeah if you've had a fish tank or specifically like shrimp tanks especially um there's the um planaria flatworm and they look vaguely similar to those but they're like i said terrestrial so and these are those flat worms that people have probably seen because there's viral videos that go around of them right where they shoot out that creepy looking thing at their head where it's like you know a spider web that comes out and then it like recoil it back like it's a horrible thing to see but most people have seen this i know there's videos going around of them and that's kind of what that is what we're talking about yes yep yeah these ones don't shoot that web out it's more what's it it's a process yeah probably and it's basically using a harpoon they just they just pierce whatever they're trying and then yeah but they'll they're not i i hate them i hate those and then i hate the snails that those are my favorite the snails oh god yeah it becomes when you're when you want certain inhabitants to be in the soil you realize how difficult it is you really that's why people end up going to the sterile side right like you have an environment that's perfect for isopods and springtails well it's perfect for a bunch of things and yeah so as far as microfauna maybe nick did you want to jump in and just you know whatever you have to say about microphone you can go for it oh they're they're really good yeah they're really good i like them so i've been collecting uh different species of springtails uh like currently um i'm working with what i found in the greenhouse which is kind of cool it kind of shifts between black and greenish color and it's a it's a felsoma genus i believe similar to your um felsoma candidates which are the temperate white ones and then prior to that i started culturing the um i just call them peach springtails i found them on a coconut plant that i was growing and they do really well in the heat and i'm pretty sure green oasis i traded him for some he's producing a ton now but they're really great at breaking down animal waste to make it available to plant roots which is quite handy bioactivity bioactive it says bioactive the whole talk about bio active what you guys love we all love it mike do you have any cleanup crew critters that you like um i mean standard like springtails isopods that kind of deal like you mentioned the millipedes actually are a really good cleanup crew they do everything yeah they do and then um beyond that though yeah mealworms work well um there's a lot of different stuff that that works but even in like if you don't set up a bioactive tank and or with a cleanup crew i guess i should say and you just have like a plant or two and even no plants uh there are a lot of times in just the soil that you use coconut coconut core whatever a lot of times there are little i don't know what they are actually but they're just little like black insects of some kind that don't seem those springtails those are springtails mm-hmm okay so yeah i mean just the the little chrome ones too i get my tanks just show up they're really cool yeah they're popular like shiny blue green ones yeah yeah i always have a little black one though i've never seeded a tank ever and i just know i just count on them to eventually show up and they always do yep always they follow through every time i can't remember the last time i seeded a tank and every time i go in and i like look under the leaf litter it's all kinds of little bugs he's like yeah cool bio-active man i just remember when troy sent us a picture of like a montenegro isopod in one of his dark frog tanks he's like yo i just got this so i just threw them in my tank and i'm like try those are like like thirty dollars in isopod or something silly it's like that whatever man they do their job well so that that whole story that some guy messaged me on instagram like hey do you want isopods i'm like what he's like i'm selling isopods you want me i'm like i don't know dude okay he's like yeah i can get you some orange ones and then some powder blues and like dude i don't know what you're talking about all right cool how much do i understand he's like 50 bucks like okay so 750 bucks and then like this was during the winter time and it went on for like two three months he kept saying bro i'm gonna send him i'm like i'm not even messaging you like asking about them so dude take your time and uh he's like i'm gonna hook you up i'm gonna hook you up i'm like okay cool like whatever i don't care about isopods but i'm just trying to help somebody out so um and then when it came down he's like all right i'm ready to ship it all right cool here's my address we shipped them out and i got all kinds of stuff there were orange isopods there was like dalmatians there was albinos clowns and all these like i was just like cool man he looked it up so i just like emptied i just like through the whole containers and tanks and then he messaged me later that day he's like bro did you get the package i was like yeah he's like what was in it i was like i don't know a bunch of different types of isopods he's like was it the ones like clowns and i'm like yeah he's like oh dude that was like a 400 and was supposed to go to somebody else i can't i can't get him back now i threw up i just emptied him in the tank and he's like oh i was like dude i'll send you like more money to make it better i'm sorry like i didn't i didn't like read the labels i just feel like i don't care about isopods he was super bummed so he sent somebody that was supposed to get like a 400 ship just a ton of orange i said yeah i was like dude i don't know there were powder blues in here and there were oranges you kept saying you were going to hook it up so he's like but you don't know what like albinos and i'm like no i'm a frog guy like i don't i'm not i don't collect isopods again i think i've seen these outside [Laughter] that's pretty much how i treat it these are roly-polies to me pill bugs dude yeah i don't i don't i mean i i understand that the collectibility of the isopods to a certain extent but like when people like rubber duckies and all these things that are getting like 60 80 bucks for a bug i'm like what what is going on in the world i'm struggling to sell this amazing looking yellow back to victorious for 40 bucks and people are dying to get these rubber ducky bugs that burrow in the ground like what is going on it drives me nuts drives me nuts but um yeah so whatever i i'm not into the culturing aspect of the the microphone i mean i have springtails and that's it that's the only thing i'd blow in the tanks occasionally for baby bufaga but other than that all my things just have microphone in it and i don't does anyone culture isopods here i i did once and then i kind of gave up you do mike yeah yeah what would you would you keep just a bunch of different ones um yeah so i got like kind of all the ones that troy mentioned i have like powder blues powder oranges dalmatians um dairy cows yep dairy cows uh i do have the montenegro or the clown isopods um nothing are those cool why are they like i mean the short answer is they're not okay okay they're cool to look at and they're interesting like colorful bugs yeah yeah they're colorful that's basically the only appeal that they have to them i i mean when i was here over the summer yeah exactly when i was here over the summer i mean i had a lot more and like some of the more expensive ones too and i basically came back to like dry crusty bins when i came home my mom's like well you didn't tell me to do anything i was like mom that's like six hundred dollars of bugs and she was like why yes and i was like okay well that's just kind of my like exit from the the hobby or whatever you you know i culture the like super common or the dwarf whites too dwarf purples like i culture those common ones and the useful ones and then the montenegros i just have because they're cool like they they look interesting but i don't i'm not sitting there every day like wow these are so neat it's like i haven't fed the isopods in three weeks i'll throw it up do you think the hype is gonna like die down on them eventually i don't know because there's more and more always being found so i think it's just going to become like it'll be a choice scenario of like oh yeah throw your your montenegros in the tank and like that's what they do they'll live they'll breed they'll produce but you know they're they're more functional than than pre so games gonna gonna lose some hype eventually no i don't know i don't think so there's more and more coming up okay nick would know profits from the nursery yeah nick would know much better than that it's not dying anytime soon especially last year everyone's at home everybody wants a plant because they're locked in your house it's like oh people just kill plants all over the place last year but as far as the expensive isopods are are people keeping them and not using them as a cleanup crew and they're keeping them yeah oh yeah yep i had no idea some bugs my buddy dion has like or had i don't know how many he still has right now but he had something like 35 different species slash colors slash whatever you want to call them and now that there's all these ones from asia being imported like the um armadillidium or what are these yeah the comparison brazilian species too yeah like there's a bunch of ones out there that are just absurdly like a hundred dollars for one wow not a culture one damn i can get into this yeah yeah right come on dude some money i mean i know frog like alex from frog daddy like the majority of that of their businesses isopods and plants that's the majority that's like they make a ton of money through that and for a place like that like for a place that is mostly dart frog breeding i you have to diversify and you have to have those regular customers that come for every week for fruit fly cultures because they don't want to make them or you know they're setting up a new tank so they want to get 30 plants or whatever you know you got to have that kind of stuff like return customers that's why rizzo he got out of frogs i mean like frogs it seems like the dark frogs gets people into wanting to make it a business and then they shortly realize like it's hard very hard to make a business out of selling the actual animals yeah it's the it's the you know the materials dry goods which is true for every every like animal related business i mean yeah when when you could sell dogs in pet stores in canada yeah sure they'd sell for two three thousand dollars whatever but you know it's the that's a one-time cost that you know that person will buy a two thousand dollar dog and have it for 12 years but it's the recurring 80 dog food that they have to buy every six weeks that is the the income maker you know it's them getting people through the door to look oh oh yeah i need to dog food oh crap i needed a toy too like it's his birthday next week or whatever so yeah i mean that's where i'm always critical of the especially on the reptile side with the ball python trade is like people really assume that you can just make a business selling animals and it's a lot harder than you think and i would rather people have different types of isopods than different types of ball python morphs i feel like that's maybe a little bit more ethical probably more profitable too yeah exactly i feel like they're kept i feel like they're kept similarly it's the exact same care yeah throw them in a tub keep them warm and humid and yeah yeah exactly so let's dive into a little bit of uh fungus or fungi mushrooms and i i have no clue about this at all besides the ones that i would randomly pop up yeah nick let it go i'm i'm in it too i i'm first in fungi as well so you're gonna have like you got your fungus that break down uh nutrients and then you got your fungus that just kind of steal nutrients but they serve a really good purpose so like the first kind you're gonna see in nine or not ninety percent but you're going to see these yellow mushrooms that are going to pop up out of the dirt and now that's a flower pot of fungus pretty much if you use coconut coir it's going to pop up if it's moist and warm in there and they basically their sole purpose is to just um break down as much nutrients as possible that's in the substrate and then reproduce make the mushroom and then die and they don't really do anything other than that i haven't seen too much benefit from them other than the fact it's like oh cool a mushroom now the other type are called it's like a symbiosis these are mycorrhizae and trichoderma fungi and their whole purpose is they connect to a plant root and then they'll actually send out um filaments into the substrate which allows for extra extraction of different nutrients that the plant can't grab itself whether it be for um the ph is too high for the plant but the it's available to the fungus or vice versa and then the plant in turn feeds it by giving it sugars and carbohydrates to keep growing yeah and so the most common one is the our arbuscular fungus is that the it's like an a it's shorthand it's like am fungus yeah that's the most common like it's the oldest like most diverse i guess class of fungi and it does literally like integrate with the root of the plant and how it works is some of them will excrete like enzymes and such like that to actually like degrade wood and stuff like that to actually bring the nutrients back to the plant and the hyphae or the like filaments that nick was saying basically extend nick will probably know more about this than i do but like essentially a root will cause like a depletion zone so it'll use up the nutrients in a given area and you know you're not looking at a root and it's going like a worm trying to find everything it takes time to move and grow towards nutrients but the nice thing about the hyphae or the fungi filaments is that it extends past that nutrient zone and takes nutrients from that area and brings it to the plant so that's it essentially it just makes for healthier plants so does that look like a mushroom like is it a mushroom that comes up through the snow yeah so there's two there's two different kind of well there's a fruiting body which is the mushroom nick that's correct yeah yeah there's the fruiting body which is the mushroom and that will release the spores and kind of continue the propagation of the the fungus elsewhere and then there's the hyphae or or the essentially the part that you don't see and that's the stuff that stays in the ground that that connects things like fungus is a whole yeah insanely cool interesting topic because uh like i took one class about fungus and and kind of associations with plants and stuff and it essentially allows communication between different trees via fungus it's called a common mycorrhizal network yeah yeah so it's like there's just so many can transfer nutrients between the trees because yeah yeah so how does someone go about incorporating this into a viv so i've used it in pretty much all the setup bibs i've i've used to mix of trichoderma and mycorrhizae because they both um they'll choose certain species to actually form a symbiosis with because not all are compatible but you basically you can buy these online a lot of work organic garden growing websites will sell it and you just mix it up with dechlorinated water and then you water it into your substrate and i believe there are a few companies now i think josh's frogs mixed in with uh fertilizer and then you just sprinkle it in and then it's basically just a mix of either of those two most likely my mycorrhizae because it's easier to farm yeah i'm pretty sure like the bioshocks are just mycorrhizae and a little bit of um fertilizer but you can source your own like nick said very easily for much cheaper yeah oh that's really interesting so and then as far as so that one that species doesn't have a fruiting body is what you're saying so you'll never see no so are there go ahead oh a lot of the mycorrhizae the plant actually needs to die in order for the fungus to then produce spores and it's generally just around the root zone so if the plant they'll just wait in the ground for another route to grow by and then they'll wake up essentially and then start off cool that is fascinating is there anything else that we wanted to add about uh fungi before we moved on highly recommend it like you're going to see 10 times the amount of growth from your plant if you don't or if you have it opposed to not having it like you can even look up online where they've done like studies you'll see two patches which are like 10 feet apart one was watered in with a mycorrhizae the other one wasn't you'll see the plants three times the size wow that's amazing and there's a lot of like super cool not so much for vivs and stuff but when i was in that class there's a lot of like benefits to the fungus in like uh antibacterial properties uh anti other fungal properties as well there's a lot of i mean if you're listening to listening to this look into it i mean it's a whole thing where you can go into scientific papers and and see all the really cool research that goes on with it they've even found i think one species when i was researching it that um of bromeliad that goes off of fungal association essentially like a lot of bromeliads as you may or may not know take up the nutrients primarily from the actual pot itself the new or the roots are basically just structural to anchor it to something but the in the the paper that i was reading in south america they found one species that had a very loose fungal association so they thought that potentially it was uh actually getting nutrients from said fungus rather than just in the little ponds that form in the bromeliads so gotcha well yeah that is i think a huge tip for people i think a lot of people don't even realize actually i put that bio shot in this one enclosure that i had years ago and i didn't even realize that that's what it was i just thought it was great and like i thought it was just something that you put in and it was i didn't realize that it was a fungus so that's pretty cool okay so we're like an hour and 40 and we haven't really talked about plants yet but you can see how how complicated this like these topics are there's so many threads and things to to that's a really good foundation i know it flies by but these are those topics this is why you know the hobby is a complicated thing and people now you know they want the 10 second tick tock to tell you how to you know make sure everything you know have success on everything it's like well look we gotta talk for an hour yeah exactly yeah i would i would like that tic-tac-toe yeah that subbed for sure yeah so it is tough to you know you got to flush out the conversation before we get into things but now i think we have so let's talk about some plants and first thing i think i've noticed about everybody here is the species diversity is huge across what you guys are doing and i think that's what really makes a an enclosure look amazing it's not like two species that are growing it's you know there's 10 12 different species and it just looks amazing and most of us just like we've kind of been joking about pothos but that's like the only plant that most of us use pothos or ficus and things like that or you know nick had listed a few that are just the common greenhouse plants that many of us just gravitate towards and i think that just doesn't make an enclosure look great it's using these small creeping plants and just all these different accents so the first question i have is where do you get your plants and since we both have there's an international conversation here maybe we'll start with troy where do you get your plans and that way the american listeners can can i just say something really quick before point should i try but this is just an introduction for those of you that are just kind of getting into it keep in mind that this is not where you have to start what dylan said and the pothos and and photonia or whatever like that is perfectly fine getting into the hobby like you're gonna notice and i know troy will say it and we'll talk about it i'm sure but the price of the plants that we are putting in these enclosures are now even higher than when troy first built in his stuff a while ago but it you're gonna be spending like a hundred dollars on a plant or 80 or 100 like 300 you can even go up to so if you're just starting off it's okay to keep pothos get your get your kind of feet under you and start marching and slowly upgrade yeah yeah that's so true don't don't go murder your thousand dollar isopods in your thousand dollar plan it's all new yeah no i i agree with that i'd say it's best to to not get those expensive plants you know on your first couple vivariums i mean once you understand how to get the you know the actual enclosure right for the plant growth then maybe it's like all right try try an expensive plant here and see how you do and um you know it would probably probably be successful dart frog keeping but um yeah i i agree with mike i mean it's it's okay and there are some really cool cheap plants um and they're not cheap because the way they look it's they're cheaper because they're more common and they are so easy to grow but there are i mean like ficus looks like it's vanilla looks cool for a month or two and that's just like get out of here i i hate it and i mean some people like nerve plant fatonia i absolutely hate i don't like the way it looks i don't think it it looks super like it doesn't look very natural to me um although like paul fowler my buddy who was in peru occasionally he'll come across a little patch and it is cool but it's it's it's a rare thing to see and it doesn't it doesn't overpower the scene he's showing where in tanks it's like it completely can overpower and i just i don't like that but um okay so to answer your question where do i get my plans um primarily a lot of my stuff comes from mike rizzo from glassbox tropicals um a lot of other hobbyists too if i'm looking for something specific a lot of the time they just have stuff and when i'm buying frogs from them or we do trades um but i i would say as far as like if i'm looking for a specific plan and a buddy doesn't have it but where i'm gonna trade i'm gonna go to mike who mike is a buddy from glassbox tropicals but i'll usually message him see what he's got um there's a couple others uh there's a guy in ohio his name's larry larry snow he runs uh i think my dream session on instagram is his tag or his handle um he's got a lot of stuff he's also friends with rizzo um frog daddy's got a really good selection and my and alex is really reasonable with pricing on a lot of these plans um but i've also you know in the over the years have done stuff from ebay um there's a couple brilliant guys um michael's bromeliads i use him for bernalillo's yeah there's you know trump of florida too down in florida so it just depends on what i'm looking for to who i'm going to go go to um yeah those are those are my sources that i would use cool and what about our canadians here mike maybe you can start um so for me the i i mean i have to plug myself i am trying to like start getting more plants up for sale as well you knew it was coming troy come on okay a lot of my plants all either import or go to other hobbyists like troy said um obviously up here we have understory enterprises which is kind of one of the founders of the darfrog hobby and they have a lot of cool plants um he has a plot in peru that he's able to export plants from and stuff like that and a lot of stuff comes from there and he has a very weird small filo dungeons that you can't find anywhere else um lots of random stuff like that uh for more like commercial stuff if you're in ontario there's a couple greenhouses um vandermeer nursery has a lot of like interesting variety that you don't see a lot of other places um there's kim's nature in markham that has a lot of viv savvy plants i suppose like they have some microsorum they have um different like orchids smaller orchids they have a lot of cool stuff there so that they're primarily on instagram kim's nature um beyond that there's not a whole lot else and and hobbyists friends hobbyists other instagram accounts that kind of deal yeah nick is there anything else to add to that list yeah i'd say with like canada it's getting a lot better now but basically anywhere you see something cool is where i get my plants like i've even gotten some water very hot plants right now from walmart like yeah i got the original epipedium blue before it was a thing and now it's selling for like thirty dollars for a two-node plant is that what that see blue blue was that synthetic other hobbyists a lot of these little boutique niche flower shop house plant stores they'll get stuff and then mike tytooly who imports stuff wow double plug hit me up on instagram right to caution that though uh if you're in uh like if you're buying from walmart nick is very experienced keep in mind that a lot of plants that come from big box stores have tons of pests like that's that's how we got a lot of the pests that we have right now is uh bree's sister brought in a plant from walmart and it had the whole gamut spider mites uh it had uh mealybugs it had like everything imaginable literally this was right before winter so it like winter like the plants were starting to shut down for for winter is it mike no i it couldn't i didn't even know it was in the house with a biology major and you know oh no i sterilized it i threw it outside at minus 30. so yeah okay fire yeah take it out of that substrate and you got to clean that 10 bleach solution yeah so yeah that is something i mean there's some really annoying pests that can come off and if anyone wants to listen to yeah thrips and the mealybugs are so horrible and yeah in the episode that i had nikon if anyone wants they can go back and listen to some quarantined procedures because we did go over that and yeah yeah if you if you find a good deal at walmart you're definitely going to want to keep it in a separate room for months and do your quarantine because it it is so annoying those any of those pests are really difficult to get rid of um okay so i think that good that lays out a good foundation for for where people can get plants and i think what we'll do is feel free to continue to list plants as they come to your head but don't feel like you need to list everything you've ever used because that's for people listening it's not going to be that helpful just listening to random species of plants so that's where i think the list will come in and we'll compile that list so people listening if you don't know what they're talking about don't worry we'll make sure that there's a list that you can go back and take a look at what species but i wanted to kind of focus on a few different areas of types of plants and the first one i thought would be creeping plants and i think that's one area which you know that really makes an enclosure look nice when you have plants creeping so what are some of the favorite creeping plants and also how are you planting them to make them successfully creeping if that's a question i can ask so maybe we'll start with troy okay um so for creepers i i generally use mark ravia a lot and you know i guess for beginners i would say look for like marc gravia rectiflora grows really fast and really crazy um also like microvia surname grows grows pretty quickly it looks very similar just wreck the floor seems to get a little bigger um i don't use either of those anymore because they it eventually it takes longer than say a ficus canola but it does the same thing it grows to the top and then when they have nowhere to go then they start becoming a bush and it just takes up so much space so i don't use those anymore but um to plant those um all my vines i pretty much plant the same if if you're planting it on like say a lot of people i've seen lately i've been adopting my uh the dry lock method i do and if you're going to be doing that it's it's if you just go to and you don't rinse the dry lock very well there is some sort of residue on it and it'll you're going to get the leaves are going to brown they're going to die the plant's not dead it will eventually grow new growth but if you don't want that to happen rinse it very well and then even then so i get a little bit of sphagnum moss and i will just a very thin like little strip of it lay it on the background and then put the mark ravia on top of that and then i just use a toothpick two toothpicks and basically make an x to pin it up you can also use super glue if you want to use super glue a tiny bit of super glue to this uh the sphagnum moss to the plant will work as well um so i do that with all my vines and yeah primarily like i said the only vines i'm using are mark ravia's mainly um and and for like what i'm i particularly like are like the umbilata species some tennis eyes and tennis is my favorite it's slow and it's really big and it just looks elegant i guess i don't know if that makes sense but it just looks really nice um and it like i said it takes a while the emboladas are smaller and they're a little slower too and there's like a red envelope mendez is one i use those are all like the mark robbies that i personally use um but then i also use pepperonis too which the ones i tend to use one is like a vine it's a creeper um and it's serpents pepperoni serpents i use a lot um and it stays kind of smaller but then also you get some leaves that get bigger which is nice you just get a variety of of size with that um and then i use a marginal the marginal is my favorite pepperoni i use it's it's super tiny um and it looks really cool like draped across you know it will creep too and it'll but it it drapes so it creeps and then it goes downward so it looks really cool on protruding pieces of wood it kind of cascades down and creates a lot of depth there because you'll see that up front and then behind it you can see the like the mark ravia or if i've got um like the vera costume i use a lot um i use the small version or the mini they call it um so i use that a lot and you'll see that behind it creates a a lot of depth with you know the cascading plant you know that's like the marginal that i use so i would say for vines i'm trying to think if there's anything i'm missing um that's really the only vines i use are pepperoni and makravia i don't i'm done with ficus so you will not find that in any tanks anymore those days are over long gone even though the the quercufolia which is like the oak leaf bike is um it's slower but like i i completely ripped it out of my green stuff halloween tank it took you know four years but eventually it does what else does it just it completely chokes out any other plant and you're just left with just giant bush of i mean i ripped it i had like a a 30 whatever 13 gallon trash bag full of it and i just i asked like one friend i was like hey do you want this like no oh my god i just pitched it yeah i mean there's probably a ton of money worth of plants that you could sell individually cuttings but it's like i'm not into that i'm not a business i'm a hobby so um i'm a hobbyist i should say but um i'm just looking around the tanks right now to see if i'm missing any i have that cebu blue i guess that's considered a line um but i like i said that's it's on the list of probably not going to be using it much longer because it just gets crazy and i throw it out um yeah that's that's all i can think of right now oh i do like the i forgot to mention it's the solanum ecuador uh i really like that plant it's a really easy grower it's fast but it doesn't get crazy like it doesn't i guess it's hard to explain it it grows fast and easy but the leaves stay small and it doesn't have send out as many runners i guess as the mark ravios do um in some of the other vines so so i i do like that as well i'll throw that name in there um but yeah that's what i'm gonna use provide i'll throw it to one of these guys and see yeah see if they agree or what what they can add to the yeah nick did you want to add anything to uh that completely agree with the uh marginalis definitely one of my favorites out there um i really like also peperomia scandans um that's more of a you can find the variegated one relatively easy the green ones are a bit more hard to find but it's if you want to have apothose but not actually have a pothos sort of plant because it doesn't grow as crazy but it still looks really nice when it starts binding another one would be begonia thelma it's technically not a vine but it's relatively available it will kind of creep over whatever surface you got uh you're gonna find it a weed eventually and have to butcher it but it'll grow back fine and then another cheap vine i've heard called the poor man's uh uh i can't remember but polonius polonius are um definitely uh a good one if you're not looking to spend a whole lot but yeah there's polonia pulchra which is like the watermelon blind and then there's ah or uh polonia serpens is that the other one i think that's right yeah yeah yeah yeah those ones are good and then the epipedium can adam sibu blue which is expensive that one's fun it's apotheos so it's gonna grow like nuts and you're not gonna get mature leaves in a tank unless you allow it to stay straight but you're gonna need a house sized tank for that to happen so it's a nice plant though that's a nice plant yeah yeah it is it looks good and mike did you have any other ones that you wanted to throw on that um if we're going for kind of just like the vining aspect of it um there is another solanum the ulanum purple it's like a really weird uh really cool yeah it's a really cool plant like it was like a little like is that the one that goes like a little like almost like a bush yeah yeah it grows it grows super interesting like it has a really interesting leaf shape and habit to it so that's nice uh it's definitely not common um it's it's not a super common plant at all uh but it is a really cool and it just adds like if you're looking for something that'll grow up the background that isn't a uh you know a standard kind of green leaf flat against the background shingler then it's a good option uh speaking of shinglers there's also um monstera dubia there's um there's some root of foreigners if you guys are wait when's this coming out dylan uh this will be out in a couple weeks probably a week yeah at least two weeks probably okay so chances are if you're listening to this and you're in ontario you're probably too late but uh vandermeer nursery has like 10-inch steak dubia right now for like 70 or something so believe it or not that is dirt cheap for that plant and if you're interested in growing it then that's definitely i kind of regret not buying it i was there i was like no not today then i was like mike you would buy that for 70 and sell it for like 400 right exactly unbelievable you're unbelievable sick oh that's mike that's mike's prices well it is crazy i'm lower than most people now i was ahead of the times and now i'm below the times we're good troy you're undercutting exactly okay so that's good so i think that's some good some good lists of of climbing plants and i wanna there's a few other things i wanna touch on one is planting tips for planting epiphytes and troy you kind of touched on it with the the super glue as far as your bromeliads and any other air plants and whatnot how what do you suggest as far as making them stick onto driftwood or into the background what are you doing or using twine or super glue or whatever so yeah it's it's either uh it's either super glue if you're if you want to stick to the wood for the background yeah either super glue uh the super glue gel because i use the gorilla glue super glue gel um i use zip ties black zip ties and you just kind of what i'll even do on those is all if it's like a really heavy bromeliad sometimes the super glue just doesn't want to doesn't want to support it so i will do multiple black zip ties and then i cover the zip ties and super glue and then cover those in live moss and that that tends to look pretty cool um and uh yeah not only i don't only super glue like bromeliads or zip tie vermilions i do a lot of orchids i super glued to the wood and even like um a lot of the phyllo dungeons and ethereums um i'll use the super glue method on those as well so you just take a small dab of glue and then just stick the stem somewhere and then you're good to go so what i what i typically do is if i'm doing orchids or or aroids i'll take like a little um i'll put a little dab on the actual wood and then i will do dry sphagnum moss onto that and then so that creates like some sort of base and then i do another dab of super glue on the sphagnum moss and then put the plant onto that so that creates like a multiple you know if it's a heavier plant it still wants to sag then sometimes i'll even put basically i'll take a little like bit of uh more more moss and put like a strip of the glue and then pretty much almost like almost using like a piece of tape but it's moss with glue um well and also if i'm doing stuff into the background like i mentioned on earlier um two the sharp end double-sided toothpicks are one of my best friends i use them for some minutes they're perfect it just literally any any vining plant that is as well you want to if you want to climb in a certain direction you can just pin it in certain points um and then i i do trim off the pointy ends because my frogs are delicate so i don't want them to scrape their little bellies you don't want a skewer frog troy don't want a skewer um and you only really need to keep the toothpicks in for a couple weeks i mean those roots grow so fast that you can pull them out um or leave them in and whatever you want to do but yeah those are my ways of planting any aphidic plants my favorite i would say is that glue just because it's so clean and you just don't have to do anything but your fingers aren't clean unless you wear gloves that's also i do want to touch on on the the super glue trick with the cotton balls be very careful i basically burned it's just healing now but then it's like healed can i describe what that is for people who aren't aware of what you're talking about describe what that is and then describe why superglue and characters is dangerous so there's a chemical reaction that happens with a little bit of just 100 cotton balls or cottons i know some of the some people use like the cotton from a cigarette filter um and you you put it in the crevice wherever you're trying to create some sort of bond and then the super glue on top of that there's a chemical reaction that happens in it that cotton and the glue hardens and it bonds two things together and it creates a a large amount of heat and if you're i mean if you're not careful and you want to use some sort of tool when you're trying to you know pat the glue and the cotton down if you use your fingers you i basically burnt like two holes in my fingers like it was i was screaming in the garage like it was excruciating and you couldn't i couldn't do anything because the glue was stuck you're like i'm trying to pull it apart and it was just burning and then i tried to like peel it off and it got on these hands i'm just like like running around the garage my hands were just burning um so definitely wear nitrile gloves and even wearing gloves i would still think it could probably burn through that yeah so it's best to wear gloves and then use some sort of tool um a metal tool or a smooth edge metal tool or even toothpicks would work i would think as well yeah definitely be careful do working with superglue because it the chemical reaction happens is hot so yeah and obviously you wouldn't do that for like binding a plant to a piece of wood but you're talking like you know taking two pieces of driftwood or connecting it to the background you know patting the cotton in and then dabbing glue on it it makes that weld but it gets hot yeah it's it's a really small method but yeah you got to be careful when you're your mileage may vary i couldn't get it to work so i should have taken chemistry yeah the canadian super glue doesn't seem to to have the properties and to kind of go or mike's biology degree is just too smart it's possible um they it's like we tried probably eight different kinds of super glue like we went out and bought every single kind of super glue that we could find and we tried it densely packed lightly packed um we put super glue on first then put the cotton then put more cotton and the more super glue and then like we tried so many different and it never smoked like it works it works it hardens to like it just hardens like hardens like certainly wood was the super glue super runny yeah very liquidy yeah very liquidy very extra liquid super blue i don't get it i don't get it i don't know i i can't figure it out and it was very frustrating we spent like eight fifty dollars on different super glue just buying it because i mean in canada the price for one bottle is like 12 to 15 dollars so did you turn up business real cheap stuff yep yeah we use like super cheap like basically dollar store liquid that was the best kind that i found was that was like two bucks i just couldn't figure it out i don't know i don't understand we'll have to send uh mike some super glue troy to see if if it's an accident next time that we're allowed to go across the board yeah deal um next time i'm allowed to go across the border freely or more or less freely uh i i will genuinely be buying super gluing and bringing it back like i'm not joking cause it's so much easier than spray foam a spray foam is such a mess and then and then i think the super glue cotton method actually welds it even harder in place so yes i mean like i still i still cover it with great stuff um but it's you're using less great stuff and it's just it's a lot you have so much more control you're not like working as fast because you know that's already welded up there for i i did hear that the super booth and that method eventually it i heard it it loses its strength eventually somebody was saying if it's like underwater but i don't know myself not underwater so but so far the pieces that i used were wood was like making branches i've had so one other thing i wanted to talk about or a couple other things one is the that hydralon method or you know hydrolon material and i as far as i can tell maybe nick and mike will have a better idea it doesn't seem like that's easily available in canada and it's it's a really really cool product and so i guess maybe what was that what what did i say hi you said hi drollon what is that yeah you were mixing like the hydroton in the high ground oh oh it's hygrolon yeah yes okay so hygrolon so maybe troy you could start with explaining what that is and why it is such a neat product and then maybe the two canadians have an idea of how to replicate that effect with what we have here i can tell you how to replicate it um there's so basically um it's a mesh material um i know serpent serpent design calls it like a geotextile fabric or something but um yeah it's like a mesh material and it's they sell similar things to it on amazon it's it but they call it uh speaker mesh cover um and i i've i stamped my bought that and i've sampled both um so the hygrolon is basically the mesh material double-sided so if you look on the front of it and look on the back of it it looks identical and it's so it's thicker the speaker mesh stuff um is just one side you only see that that mesh pattern on the one side on the back side it's just like a flat black kind of even finer mesh but it's so it doesn't wick up as much material and that's what the hydrolon is so good at i mean you you could not miss the tank and if you just had a water feature in a tank like um just uh you know filtered water and circulated water in the bottom and as long as you covered the background and that hydrolon dipped into the water area it's going to wick up water probably 60 to 75 percent the way up um and it'll constantly be moist it's not waterlogged or soaked it just constantly stays nice and damp i would say um so it just wicks up water and it retains water really well that's why you know in the tanks that i've done backgrounds on with the dry lock and then some people ask me why do you do dry luck on some why do you do hygrolon on some it's just like i just try different stuff all the time and whatever i've got available i'm just like yeah i'll just throw that on so um there's no real difference but that why i'm using it but i will say when i use the hydrolon the plants grow significantly faster it fills in way faster um you know then then with the dry lock but over time a year and a half down the road it's the same thing you know you're not really going to see a difference but the speed of the the plants growing in on the high ground is the difference they carpet over really quick yeah and and so to touch on i do know how they you guys could create that in canada would be to get that speaker mesh and you would just have to basically i don't know buy a sewing machine and just i would just sew a seat you know just sew strips to kind of make it bond together so it's not going to fall apart but that would be literally the exact thing that same thing as the hybrid line so that's that's what you would do and i i've i've heard people have used the the speaker mesh fine they haven't had a problem with it the problem with the way that i have used hydrolon that was taught to me to use it was using gorilla glue and when you use that gorilla glue it's basically great stuff in a different state it's a different stain it doesn't expand it expands like very little but when you put that hydrolon on the gorilla glue a lot of times that really seeps through um and that's what two-sided high growl on if you're using the speaker mesh that stuff's gonna creep through like crazy and i would i would think that you're gonna lose a lot of the wicking properties because it's all gonna be taken over by the glue um correct yeah but if you do use it in a different method if you're not using with gorilla glue i guess it could be used with success i would think um as long as you still had if you touch the cloth and it's still dry like felt like cloth and not hardened glue i would think it still work so how i know you use gorilla glue troy do you attach it a different way now or is it still just really good i recently redid a tank and i didn't have any gorilla glue on me but i know gorilla glue and great stuff are basically the same things just different states um so what i did last time this most recent time is i just put the great stuff pond and stone down and while it was wet while it was wet i just pushed pushed the hydra on right into it so um and it created a bond it doesn't pull off um so you can do that's a very easy way to do it um you don't have the only problem with that is you're not going to have control of how much it expands you know i like to let the film expand shave it down and then i put them so you know you can you that's the only the disadvantage that you're not going to have the control of the how much it expands okay and then so mike do you do anything to try to create have you tried to create that wall sort of carpeting plant like that's what's so cool with the hygrolon is that you create this it's essentially just a carpet a wall of plants and it looks like a background that's just completely covered with moss or whatever you have growing is there any success you've had trying to replicate that without um not no as is a short answer yeah um maybe the speaker stuff is the next thing to try yeah i can definitely try that actually my buddy brought in a bunch of hygrolon from from rizzo and so i just bought the bag of it like i have enough to do a couple tanks now so that's what i'm gonna be doing but yeah um i might set up because i'm planning like kind of a troy aesthetic of like the same size tanks i'm gonna try and do one maybe i'll use it as an experiment do like one speaker foam one or a speaker mesh or whatever you want to call it and one high ground and just see the the comparisons like plant similar if not the same plants in both tanks and just see how they do speaker stuff's cheap it's real cheap yeah yeah it's super cheap and hygrolon is not especially in canada it's not cheap um so that's a something that i'll probably jot down and actually end up doing because that would be useful to especially the canadian hobbyists um but something that you have to know in i don't know what the demographic of your viewership is but it really does work great for dart frog keepers a lot of those vining plants won't have that habit on something like a chameleon tank or stuff like that just because it's not i have to say wet enough because it you know you're missing like troy miss what eight times a day for like 15 seconds or something and a lot of times that's not what we are doing we'll either do like a couple big mistakes or you know two three small mistings whatever it just doesn't have the same properties as a dart frog tank so if you're a viewer out there and you're wanting something like that then you have to figure out a way to either limit the ventilation and kind of shut it off either creating a screen top or or a glass top whatever you want to do but in a standard exoterra it's it's going to be tough uh just because those roots won't extend out unless there is hydrolon or the the mesh that's constantly moist they're not going to expand out and attach to a wall that's bone dry for the majority of the day yeah so maybe you could do like a drip wall or something that's constantly dripping there and it's not making the rest of the terrarium or vivarium wet um yeah nick did you have anything to add on add to that because i will start to kind of wrap up i have one more topic that i want to and it's kind of on this same point never tried hydrolon so i don't really have an opinion on it okay so oh yeah did you oh no okay short and sweet okay so you know this is kind of getting into the the territory that mike was bringing up that yeah and sort of troy talked about at the beginning where it almost feels like you're cheating with the dart frogs because it is relatively easy because you're creating this environment that's just so prime and the inhabitants don't destroy everything and that's what we run into with reptiles most of them are so rough on plants it's very tough to have success here so we might be branching out of troy's expertise here except for that little gecko that he has that's that's a micro gecko that doesn't count so as far as having success with plants with larger reptile species what what do we recommend what do we do how do we have success here without having an environment that's constantly wet all the time that allows the animal to sort of clamber over things without destroying everything maybe nick did you want to go first because obviously you have this iguana on your shoulder here you're going to work on a planted vavarium for him what are your plans there how are you gonna make it so he doesn't destroy everything uh you gotta let it establish a long time because no matter what like you're if a reptile were in the wild it's not going to be in the same place 90 of the time in most of the cases so it's not going to be constantly running over the same plant over and over and over again like you get that with people walking the same path through grass it just gets worn out so i'd have my try and hope for when i build murphy his big vivarium is i'm going to have it set for at least two months so the plants can establish they'll be well rooted in and then just pray that he doesn't uh crush everything and mow it down but well i think that's the thing is like you're gonna be it's gonna be a large enclosure and i think that's where people probably struggle with with snakes particularly we tend to have smaller enclosures and with those animals that are rough on plants you need large plants to be able to handle the roughness of the animals when you have an enclosure that's too small to fit the plant that needs so it's sort of this vicious cycle of just getting squashed so i don't know mike do you have any thoughts on this um so first you really have to establish what animal you're keeping and you can either you know go into records or research what plants are from that habitat obviously yeah a lot of these places where we get our reptiles have 50 60 meter trees there and no matter how hard that reptile tries it's not going to be able to trample that tree but you got to keep in mind and like what nick said is it's not the case for any of our enclosures you could make an enclosure the size of a room and it's not going to matter a tree is going to outgrow it you know um so it's really choosing a safe plants like for uh nick and eyes iguana like we're gonna need to pick plants that they can eat and don't have like a bunch of latex in them or or whatever um like rubber plants and and some of the other ficuses and such like that um like hibiscus nick said like that's what i'm planning to do with mine as well is have like a hibiscus plant pothos as many live plants as i can and i think another aspect especially for nick and i and people with chameleons and stuff is that or veiled specifically but it's going to eat the plants there is a high likelihood that this is just going to be a vegetable buffet for your animal it'll have you know hibiscus flowers that'll be great for it it'll eat the leaves it'll it's going to happen like you most likely are going to have to buy more than one tree uh to do it and i know like bill strand does this with his chameleons or for some reason i have the thought that he does this but he has a bunch of plants that he has growing and he just kind of sets them in the enclosure you know the chameleon does what it does and then he'll take it out for a couple months and let it kind of start to regrow leaves and regrow a bit and then he'll throw it back in and it's just a constant rotation of plants and that's kind of an extreme with with the veils with iguanas with herbivores in general um with general lizards and stuff like that a lot of plants you're going to want to look for a very um i guess cardboardy texture or almost plastic blank like texture so it's a thick leaf you want something that will actually support the animal or support the majority of the animal um it's especially with like tree frogs and stuff like that like uh the varicose um grows leaves that are you know i mean in a tank you can get a leaf that's this big and for those of you that are that are listening like 10 plus inches across so it's something that is going to look a little strange you might need to trim it back so it starts growing a little bit like smaller leaves um but those kind of leaves are what they're going to be sitting on in the wild and that's something that they're gonna need and and use so keep that in mind do you do you guys have uh philodendron montana up there montana i've heard i don't even know what it looks like it's it's what's it's that's like the big leaf the heart shape is there um it's like one of my new favorite steroids um in the 180 i mean i have them they're like they're huge really sturdy plants um really like thick leaves they look super like velvety and like delicate but i mean i'll like pull on it and it like snaps back yeah like they're very sturdy um also i would say i don't know if you guys have cool dandruff in lincoln park up there but lincoln park's another one really really sturdy like i'm just trying to think of plants if i had a lizard or something i was like worried about it yeah i think those are two really nice looking plants really easy to grow um and the lincoln park it does climb it it'll grow a bunch of big leaves and then it climbs and then it goes more big leaves um so it's a cool climber and very sturdy and and the fact that it does grow so i mean i all when i'm when i take cuttings i take one leaf and one node throw it in the tank and like three weeks later it's everywhere it grows fast so it's like if a reptile or something was destroyed a leaf here there it's like nothing to worry about it's gonna it's gonna keep growing um so i'm just trying to think like pothos style plants that are a little more on the rare side or or more have a better aesthetic i think in my opinion i'm just trying to think of plants like that well i think a part of it too will be people maybe you know using pots instead of just planting right into the soil like maybe have the pot secured up up on the wall somewhere so the roots are protected and even if you have a snake it's not going to be actually tanner from serpa design did something a couple weeks ago with his king snake he had these like oh maybe i'll put it in the show notes i'm sure many people have seen it but it was almost like a little basket where he contained the roots and the soil within and so he planted that under the substrate but that is encapsulated in something that the snake can't tamper with and so the snake still might snap the stems and snap the leaves and whatnot but maybe if you had a you know more of an arboreal setup maybe you do put plots up in the wall and kind of hide it and great stuff and and that might be a method for you know keeping them alive europeans do that all the time like especially like uh dutch rana was uh one of my big inspirations i've always been i've always looked at their stuff i mean since i got in the hobby they've but they do um they do like a insulation insulation foam boards and then they do they say called elasto pour um it's seems similar to a dry lock and they cover that and then they do great stuff and they always do um pots always some sort of pot and then they foam around it because a lot of their tanks that's where i got the idea to do a substrate list tank um because theirs are their ground areas are set up very similar to my sponge filter and moss and leaf litter but in the background you have all these pot these these pods basically where it's just i don't know if it's um i'm not exactly sure what they do if it's like a plastic pot or if they're doing actually like the the mesh pot and they're just foaming around that but almost all their tanks mesh pots here that looks like what what was that again can you name that was that an instagram account all right that's random uh dutch rana you could just google it but they do have an instagram account i don't know if it's dutch rana i'll check it right now if um but it'll be boring or someone wants to talk while i do that i'll make sure i have it in the show notes as well when we're done so people can go check it out because yeah i think people just and europe's a great place to draw ideas from you know you know we're so stuck with ways that we've been doing things here we don't think about you know how you can plant into for larger species and it's definitely possible we just got to tinker with it to find the right method well for chameleon specifically i know like bill has developed his um i think they're dragon ledges i i want to say and they're essentially a mechanism to allow you to mount pots on the side of like chameleon tanks screen tanks whatever and it's it's i don't know if it would be troy approved because it's not overly aesthetic that's a dutch a dutch ran a tank but you can see the similarities that i get from yeah it's just dutch rana on instagram go ahead mike yeah sorry it's not overly aesthetic but it works and it provides especially for chameleons the habitat that they require um where you can mount up a hanging uh tradiscantia and it's sitting there and you know it hangs down and creates a curtain for them to go hide in or you can put potholes and it grows down like it allows you to plant plants so it's not a typical kind of beginner i mean like my chameleon tank was back in the day where it was just you know one shafera planted in the bottom or set in a pot that has a couple scraggly leaves going up and it drops all the leaves on the bottom because it's not bright enough light and now you're left with kind of a skeleton enclosure and i fully admit that's exactly what my chameleon tank looks like and i will never have one that looks like that again so yeah um there's a couple different options out there obviously i'm if you're listening to this then reach out to us like we're all on social media we are all happy to answer questions uh maybe don't ask troy what moss he uses but or do it's up to you uh and uh and yeah we're all open to helping and and aiding you in your journey of of growing plants there's another page i'm gonna drop real quick um it's rana underscore terrarian valve dot d e but um they're dutch as well that's dutch ram obviously they're dutch but um yeah so here's uh kind of a construction that's probably washed out like heck and you can see their pots yeah they're netted pots and so they do a lot of they show a lot of pictures like progress pictures of how a tank looks and then like you'll see it um i hear them constructing a bunch of tanks i'm not sure if you can see the glare um but and then like that's that same tank we just looked at um and then it's all foamed in so they but the bottom area is just sponge filter matter very thin layer of it um but yeah all the pots and plants they use um they foam in and then they have like you know a picture like that of the same tank so they show a lot of progress pictures it's cool to like dutch rana forever i would just see their completed tanks and like man that's awesome how are they doing that and i'm old school so new school p new school people they they come right at me they're just like hey i'm new and they ask me a bunch of questions like old school people like us were like i wouldn't dare ask dutch rana what how do you do this i would never do that so it's it was nice to finally find a page like that that would see progress pictures and like at least i'd be able to look and see like oh oh they're doing that oh they're doing this like it was so that that page is better so than than dutch random i don't know if this this place is related to them or if they're an affiliate of some sort but um i really love that instagram page um i could text it to you or you know just message it to me and i'll make sure that it's in the show notes for people because i think that's so yeah it's so important to be able to see those progress pictures and and i think another you know on on that topic and nick and i kind of discussed this when he was on the show was creating the environment or in the viv when you're using larger or when it's for larger reptile species using wood driftwood your branches and whatnot making sure that that's what the reptile is going to be climbing on and gripping on and perching on set up the enclosure so that they don't want to use the plants the plants are there for all those other purposes you know the the oxygen and the humidity and you know they can still investigate it and but don't set it up where you're asking for the animal to be perching and squishing it i don't know nick did you want to add anything to that yeah like like i said in the other podcast all the plants that people want to grow that will get big enough for an animal to actually perch on it's going to outgrow the tank you're not going to fit a 50-foot ficus tree easily into a 12 by 12 by 18 and it's you got to prune it back and it's never gonna have that same structure it's always gonna be a sapling essentially and having large pieces of wood in there that they're able to actually perch on is gonna number one it's gonna save your plant from getting squished and number two it's something that's gonna give them a more natural behavior than trying to balance on say a little umbrella that's really spindly yeah yeah exactly so i think there are definitely going to be ways to do this people just going to have to tinker around and see what works and some species are going to be more delicate and like i find my carpet pythons fairly delicate with the plants he climbs through them he doesn't destroy them but you know maybe something that's a little heavier bodied is going to be harder but like yeah you just got to play with it yeah that's i've touched on like importance of hardscape you know in previous or live streams and other videos but yeah i think it is the hardscape is more it's important to have it you know for yourself to look interesting but also it's good to have a plan to know what you plan on putting in that tank and how they're going to utilize that that hardscape because hardscape while it does create something interesting it's also creating a ton of surface area for animals to walk crawl or even just hang out on rather than like traditional terrariums and old-school terrains where it's just a background and a flat ground and there was you know plants created a little surface area but yeah when you're creating lots of planes and and more area for plants to grow and also animal sugar it makes a huge difference in you know say an 80 gallon tank with a flat background in the flat ground is 80 gallons but when you have an 80 gallon tank and there's all sorts of different areas you're creating a lot it seems like it's a lot larger space for that animal to utilize it increases surface area like that's exactly what it does and it's whether that's for the animal itself or for the plants and and something that i don't know if maybe i know we want to wrap it up here soon but um it's uh something to say that you know growth habit of the plants is something that i occasionally get questions on it's like oh well where should i plant it there's a couple different answers that you can give and just say like a just do whatever you want like if you want to change it yeah try it out man try it out try it out you know if you want to change it you can do that but learning the growth habit of plants like we were talking about the vining plants and stuff like if you plant that in the middle of a tank a it'll probably die or b it's gonna you know snake along the back and then go straight up like it's it's not gonna do well and it'll take a lot longer to do that uh whereas you know if you have a phylodendron or whatever kind of nestled in the back it's gonna anchor its roots into the back and start going up whatever fight me mike and i thought about this uh two weeks ago and i was using the itranslate app and i just kept sending him philadelphia philodendron philadelphia philadelphia nick what do you say philadelphia yes yes i've heard both used though okay it's a heated debate but it is a good point you know understanding a how the plant's going to grow and then b how the animal is gonna behave inside the the viv and you know i think uh one of my friends roy arthur blodgett he might be he's probably listening to this right now he's been on the podcast before he has this amazing it's like eight foot by i forget it's a huge enclosure for these puffing snakes like big and he has all these bromeliads in it like it looks very similar to what's behind troy's head there and the the plants do fine they but he has a whole bunch of hardscape structure where the the animals aren't crushing them and you know understanding how to do that so it's definitely possible i think people get intimidated by it because they put one plant in there and their animals just tear it up and they're like well i guess he doesn't like plants but you know you've got to work right now is clobbering one of your plants yeah yeah yeah there's a live action right now that yeah that iguana is just terrorizing the place well i think we covered a lot this might be the longest podcast that's happened the one i did last week with the cohab was almost on two and a half this is going to be two and a half as well so is there any other things yeah well it's one of the again it's the these complicated topics that it's hard to fit within a 10 second tick tock so hopefully people stuck around is there anything else that we like rapping thoughts that anyone wanted to say before before we move on or before we let everybody go i can't think of anything besides when someone asked me how to grow a plant i just say don't let it dry out that's it just don't want to dry out see this could have been a tick-tock [Laughter] how do i grow this don't let it dry out that's that's i think the most important thing is don't let it dry out but then then you're gonna don't water log you know but i think more often so than not any the only time i ever kill something is when it dries up yeah so yeah um i guess i would say just you know enjoy the journey and and you're going to kill plants that's the fact of the matter like whether you kill the plants or your your animal eats them or it kills them by trampling them like it's a learning process and yeah well you know troy i was with him when he what he was going through that process of learning from dutch rana and not asking him but picking apart every little story he'd pick up one second like oh that's there and that's what you're gonna have to do like sure ask once but you might not get a complete answer like we all do have lives we all do have jobs or you know a significant other or a kid or whatever like we're we are busy people and we can't sit there and spend hours and hours exactly research is fun it's fun research look at papers use the the pages on or the files section on facebook groups like pull out your monocle and investigate invest exactly and see what's going on that's what i do yeah and nick did you have any closing thoughts um not really just trying he likes it how he likes it it's good i like it it's good i like it that's awesome yeah well so i think a don't be afraid to experiment try things you know people could discover different ways to care for plants especially on the reptile side which i think is pretty weak on well you know as a community we're fairly weak on it so play around with things don't be afraid to kill plants like you said and and hopefully this kind of gave everybody a good broad amount of information and like i said we'll try to put together a list of just a bunch of different species that we were throwing out because i know people will come and ask and say hey what species was that we'll make it just a giant catch-all list of of what we were talking about so you can go look at and of course like we said some of those may be extremely expensive so they're just their list is going to be there so you can see what we were talking about while we were talking about it and we could even like uh accumulate you know pretty much uh you know like entry-level plants like say twenty-five dollars and under 20 we can we could easily do that yeah i think that'll be awesome so we'll make that as a supplement to this episode for people so they can kind of print it off and have something and and yeah and of course everybody the show notes will have everything in there including you know links to the three gentlemen's respective youtube channels and and instagram pages whatnot everybody will be familiar with you guys anyway and i want to thank all three of you thank you guys so much for coming here and spending the two and a half hours talking about plans talking about microphone this was a fascinating conversation and i know it's gonna have a it's gonna be a massive resource for people so thank you very much all right that is the end of that round table discussion nick troy and mike thank you so much for stopping by i had a blast chatting with you guys and there was just a ton of information in this episode to the listeners again as i mentioned at the beginning there is that pdf that goes along with this episode you can download it and print it off you can find it at animalsathomenetwork.com just click on the round table discussions header or there is a link in the youtube description version of this episode again that will list all the plant species that we discussed in this episode and much more i hope this episode inspires people who haven't tinkered around with live plans to do so and those who already are tinkering with live plants i hope it inspires you to try something at the next level maybe order some of those more expensive plants and start tinkering with things that way my plants are really weak at this point i think everything i have here has live plants in it but it's pretty much just pothos and a few other kind of boring plants so i think i'm personally ready to start tinkering with new plants and trying to have some more plant growth in my vivariums and as you guys know i have some heavier bodied snakes so i'm going to be working on that as well and if anyone is listening has ideas of how to plant enclosures that have large animals that are rough on plants how to do that successfully make sure you put that in the comments i think if we can have the comment section on youtube with a bunch of different ideas that should help us figure out a way to add live plants without the animals you know totally destroying them so as always thank you so much for tuning in to this week's episode i do hope you enjoyed it if you did enjoy it and you found it valuable one of the best things you can do is just share it on social media share with other reptile people you know the more years we can get on the episode the better all right that is the end of that episode thank you guys so much and i'll talk to you next week

Channel: Animals at Home

Views: 43,698

Keywords: animal podcast, reptile podcast, animals at home podcast, animals at home, animals at home network, dillon perron, best vivarium plants, how to plant vivarium, troy goldberg, mike tytula, mr vivarium, best reptile plants, how to keep plants alive, best reptile plant lighting

Id: WdbwwnYIlFY

Length: 153min 15sec (9195 seconds)

Published: Sun May 02 2021