Hi, my name is Casey Patty of Small World Terrarium; you’re watching how to make a terrarium.

This clip is going to explain how to use decorative objects as finishing touches on your terrarium. Now I usually only use two elements, I use stones and we have stones of different sizes. I like to make small stones, river rocks with large ones and recently I started adding drift wood pieces as well. So basically you just use your own discretion, sometimes I like to start with the larger ones first. One little technique that I like, I don’t know if anybody notices is to take some small stones and then actually stand them on end so that they’re not sitting flat. It’s more of like an outdoor garden feature of you does that.

Now the importance of stones isn’t just decorative, especially in an open terrarium you’re going to want stones because it keeps the soil moist. It reduces the amount of soil surface areas, so the moisture stays inside close to the roots instead of evaporating then you don’t have to water as much. So just kind of drop them in, kind of you want to nestle them under low-lying plants like this. I like to take a big flat stone and stick it right there under the rabbits foot fern leg, so it shows up so overtime it doesn’t get buried. Plants will still shoot off of this even if it’s not touching the soil. And again, in a lidded terrarium this is more of aesthetic purposes, so I just kind of like to get a mix of light and dark. Big and small, that about does it for the stones.

So now the finishing touches is going to be a couple pieces of drift wood, now in most terrariums I choose two pieces. One small piece, one long piece, so I just got through a box like this. Kind of select a couple of pieces. Now one trick of the trade that I learned the hard way again is to make sure, if you’re using driftwood, set it on top of the stones. Don’t set it on top of the soil because if you set it on the soil. The wood is going to stay moist, it’s actually going to get fuzzy and start to mildew but if it’s resting on top of the stones, it always stays relatively dry and you can just kind of nestle this in. Lay those on top however, you want, just be sure to place it so it’s not pushing on the stems of any of your plants. As you can see that, there is stone under here so it’s never going to stay wet.

It will be wet when you water them but its okay. After putting in that last piece of driftwood, once you’re happy with the arrangement of the plants, the stones, and the wood. Were just going to gently spray every single plant since they’ve been through a little bit of trauma at this point, not too much since the soil of course is already wet and in doing this you can also rinse down some of the stones since a lot of them are going to be a little bit dirty too. Now once every thing has been sprayed, the rocks are shiny and clean. You are finished, you can put the lid on and stand back and admire your living work of art.