Hi, my name is Casey Patty of Small World Terrariums. Welcome to making your terrarium and in this lesson I’m going to teach you how to care for your terrarium. Once you’re an owner, once you’ve made your own.

You don’t want to water them too much; you don’t want to see too much water falling to the bottom of the soil here but if you do its okay. Overtime it’s going to evaporate. You certainly don’t want to water it too much that the water line rises above the gravel and starts to hit the soil, that means its going to stay soppy for too long. And the more you learn about your plants, there are some that actually is moist, as they like to be they don’t want to be wet. For instance, this is a purple passion plant and if this gets too moist, it will start to rot. So you have to pay close attention to plants that are a little more high maintenance. But for the most part, the ones that I’ve made are low maintenance plants, so you’ll see this one is dry. It’s not bone dry but its ready for a watering and what you’re really looking for is you’re watering your plant is how quickly the water drips down to the sides.

So just pour them in, you can see it start to drip down the edge. And I found that for a terrarium this size, I only need to do this about once a week and if you’re going to be out of town, basically take your terrarium. Make sure its not somewhere where it gets too much prolonged sunlight. Just take a magazine, cover it maybe 80% that keeps the moisture inside and you can be away for a few weeks without having to water it. Now this smaller one is actually quite dry and I bet when I water it though the water is actually going fall straight down to the gravel. So for this one I’m just going to use a smaller container, water a little more slowly.

Now since I let this one get so dry and there’s a lot of water in the bottom, one thing you can do is tilt it and get it so the water on the bottom actually starts to touch the soil and it soaks in from the bottom. So I don’t have to do this every time but if it gets too dry you might have to go through that process and for a terrarium like this, kind of have to move or roll the thing around as your watering it. So you get all the surface through this tiny hole. Now you can tell that this one is not going to need as much watering as this one here and that’s only because the opening is smaller it’s going to hold more moisture in.

So once you’ve done that, you can kind of eyeball your plants to see if everything is doing okay. Now inevitably, there is going to be some dead leaves, just pick them out but now that we’ve watered it, there is some moisture on the inside of the glass which is going to be okay. But over time, the mineral deposits in the water are actually going to leave a line of white mineral deposits along the edge. You cant see it right now because its wet but what I’m going to do is take either a soft clothe like this or small little corner of a paper towel and just moisten it with a non toxic preferably glass cleaner and I’m just going to start along this bottom line. Just get real close to the soil, this is a little time consuming but again you don’t really have to do this more than every month or so. It just keeps it looking brand new.

Now if you want an advance technique or if you have a smaller terrarium that’s harder to get your hand in there and you want it to look really clean. Just take your moist paper towel, wrap it around the edge of a chopstick, and show you on this one. You can just get right down there without your large hand directing all of these plants. So again just every couple of weeks and if you’re using distilled water, I don’t then it probably wont have as many white mineral deposits or water spots. But more often I actually just take a damp rag and just kind of wipe down inside like this. To wipe off any residue from water splashes. Now these plants will continue to grow, plants and terrariums are slow growing for the most part, because they only have so much room. But for example, this asparagus fern, as it grows it shoots right on out of the glass. Sometimes they pinch it back but usually I just tuck right in there, continues to grow around and fill out the space. And on something like this, it isn’t so tall that its sticking out but if you want to pinch something like this back, just find maybe one of the lower nodes down here.

Just pinch it with your thumbnail right above, were actually going to stick that in water later but the plant is going to continue to grow. It’s going to take some time, a few weeks for you to see any growth. Its going to continue to grow from this bottom spot right here, it will probably actually up two shoots growing up. Where as if I were to have pinch it from the top right here. It would continue to grow from the top and keep on coming out of the terrarium. So every now and then, your stones are also going to show a little bit of grit and grind and water deposits, so you just have to simply pick them out. You don’t even have to take all of them, just the ones that you think need good rinsing and then were just going to take this over to the sink and rinse them off. Now that we’ve rinsed this, just going to place some right back in and another way you can water them is with a spray bottle sine they’re a moisture loving plants.

Sorts of creates the effect of rain every now and then but if you’re doing this you still have to pour water in. and with that they look just like new, so thanks for joining me on how to make a terrarium and now you know how to make your very own terrarium.