Episode 327: What happens when you add animals to a terrarium?
Transcript
[0:07] Hello and welcome to On The Ledge. I'm your host, Jane Perrone, and this week you've mastered the art of the terrarium, but you want to elevate it further by introducing fauna to your flora.
[0:26] What animals do you introduce? What conditions do they need to thrive? And what can you do to prevent it all going wrong. This week, my guest is Adam Critien, who is also known as Earth Champion on social media. And we chat about our plant and animal filled childhoods, his exciting terrarium, vivarium and palliudarium builds, and his gold medal winning garden at the Morven Flower Show this spring.
[1:02] And if you're a Patreon subscriber of mine at the legend or superfan level, head on over to Patreon or open the Patreon app to watch and listen to Adam and I going deeper into the subject of dart frogs under glass. And if you're listening, do check out my YouTube channel or the show notes at janeberrone.com for images of some of the builds and of that Morvan Shogun.
[1:39] Adam, thank you so much for joining me on On The Ledge this week. We are here to talk about the wonderful combination that is plants and animals under glass. And I think this is a topic that lots of people are really enthusiastic about, find fascinating, want to do, but maybe don't know where to start or start and then it goes disastrously wrong. So so we're going to get into this this week finding out um lots of the fascinating, things that we need to know about plants and animals under glass it's adding an extra level and this is where i want to start with you when we're adding plants to, terrariums to make them into vivariums paludariums like the things we see behind you in the video um.
[2:30] What's where does it all go wrong what what's the what's the sort of scary advice that you would give people if they're starting out about why it's really important to get this stuff right from the beginning, oh that's a that's a great first question thank you for having me on the show by the way i'm really really excited to do this um i would say probably the the thing most people get wrong with terrariums is probably over watering, so um i would say be very careful about how much water you add It's easy to add a little bit and then top it up, but add too much and not be able to remove it. So that's where probably most mistakes happen.
[3:11] Yeah, that's a really good point. I'm an underwaterer. I have to say the terrarium behind me is always too dry. Like it's always too dry. I'm just, I'm very brutal. And I did lose a plant in there this year because I just didn't water it enough. But it's amazing how little water these plants can get by on is what I can say, having been a chronic underwaterer for many years. But that's a problem, isn't it? Because what do you do when you realise there's too much water in there and i suppose that can, relate to condensation on the glass but also just too much water at the bottom, is there a rescue remedy for when you get that situation happening and you've you have got too much water at the bottom uh.
[3:53] Not an easy way um i mean you can if you've used the drainage layer you can hope that all the excess water will kind of soak its way down, you could leave the lid open if it's thrown with the lid and you can hope that over time some of that excess moisture, the leaves will transpire and it will be pulled up from the bottom and it will evaporate out of the setup. Um you may be able to use something like a very very thin hose something like airline tubing for an aquarium and kind of poke you know kind of almost poke that right down under the drainage layer and then try and siphon the water out, but um it's very easy to get a mouthful of stagnant stinky, terrarian water i've done that i would not recommend it oh gosh i as a child i had a fish tank as a child and every week cleaning out the fish tank i would get a mouthful of that water I'm amazed I'm still here quite frankly but.
[4:48] I mean is there no device that you can buy that stops you having to do that that whole stinky water in the mouth thing cypher I mean there are, for aquariums there are things you can do to you know like almost like um like, a mini bellows that you can kind of put into like and kind of suck the air out to start the cypher, um I mean I would say normally once you've done it once you won't do it again but it sounds like that wasn't necessarily the case for you yeah i, mean i was probably about eight or nine now and when we're talking about like laissez-faire 70s and 80s parenting so you know i mean i don't know if my parents even knew what i was doing i can't really remember um i do remember having quite a few strange projects on the go in terms of plants and animals i mean i would never recommend doing this now but you know i had a, a stickleback a fish a wild fish in a big tank outside for ages um yeah so i don't know just got on with it but.
[5:49] It's a really interesting thing as you said you wouldn't do that nowadays but um, People nowadays are much more disconnected from nature. So you have to think, actually, back in the day when people were collecting tadpoles, frogs, worms, that kind of thing, and keeping them as pets, maybe not keeping them in the right conditions and maybe not taking animals from the wild is obviously not a great idea. But actually, if it helps foster a good relationship with the natural world, that's probably not such a bad thing.
[6:22] You're still doing natural world stuff i mean i we had um tad definitely had tadpoles in the classroom a big tank of tadpoles every year, um i definitely as i say must have taken a stickle back probably from the river chest which is where i grew up uh the wonderful well chalk stream i mean i don't know how it's doing now probably not so great um, but yeah all of those things were that were formative in my interest in wildlife. So that's really true. I guess now as an adult and, you know, being a catastrophizing and anxious person, I do worry about a lot about having animals in the house. My daughter has a milk snake. I'm looking after it right now because she's away on a field trip and the responsibility is weighing heavy. It's like I feel like this snake's got to be, you know, totally...
[7:15] Cared for i've got to make sure this snake is happy in every way shape and form every time she does a poo i'm so happy i'm like oh the poo looks good great you know it's fine yeah, there's a lot of pressure but i think that that's good because in a way because, um plants and animals are alike in many ways in their care but really when you, put animals into the mix it does take it up a notch It's a creature that can feel pain, that can suffer in the wrong conditions. And I think sometimes we're not done any favors by some of the places that sell these animals and make you think that it's a lot easier than it is.
[7:56] I mean, this is a tricky one because obviously everyone, you know, hopefully most people are trying to do their best, but there's often a lot of misinformation out there about plants and animals. But just tell me before we get onto that, how did you get into this world? Were you like me with animals all around your bedroom as a child or what kicked this all off for you, Adam? I mean, yeah, pretty much. It sounds like I came from a, I had a similar childhood to yours, maybe. I've always been really interested in the natural world. I used to watch all the David Attenborough documentaries. I still do, absolutely love David Attenborough. I'm a really big fan of the Irwin family from Australia. I love all their documentaries. I'm now watching those with my son. He's becoming really interested. He's six, since I've started to become really interested in the natural world as well um yeah i've always been interested in being out in nature um spotting wildlife looking at, looking how the natural world works uh i had, i used to do quite a lot of fish keeping when i was younger i started keeping fish when i was probably eight or nine i guess um, and it kind of grew from there it grew from our simple very basic small small plastic tank and a filter and a goldfish.
[9:17] All the way up to a massive big reef system in my bedroom in my childhood home, which had six aquariums all linked together, about 1,000 litres of water. I'm really lucky the floors didn't come down, to be honest. It's probably not advisable. I was farming corals there and trading them and selling them. I've done volunteer work at a local zoo and also at some public aquariums so, I've been really fortunate I've been able to, quite a lot with my interest for wildlife. And yeah, as you say, animals and plants under glass is kind of where I've landed at the moment. It's the thing I've been doing for the last probably seven or eight years and something I've become really interested in.
[10:07] Yeah, there's a lot of references there that I relate to. The only one that wasn't included in there was Chris Packham. Do you remember Chris Packham when he had the blonde mohawk doing, I can't think what that show was called with Michaela Strachan that he did back in the day he loved watching that I've been to Steve Irwin's zoo the Australia zoo, which is very very cool obviously post was it, was it before or after he passed away? I can't remember now. But anyway, that was very, very cool. So yeah, I relate to a lot of those references. I think I'm probably about the same age. And I guess today, the world is even more open to people coming into wanting to be interested in terrariums, vivariums, paludariums, because there's this huge, fountain of information on YouTube and Instagram there's so many sources of information out there that are you know you can just go and learn this stuff you don't need to open a book uh you don't need to send off a stamped addressed envelope for a catalog like.
[11:14] God I'm sounding so old I'm like that Yorkshireman sketch but you know what I mean it's like it's so everything's so available now which is great but I think it also comes with a risk um because people think oh, yeah I mean I love chameleons they're on my absolute they're on my top three animals but I would never have a chameleon personally because for everything I've heard they're really quite hard to look after they're not they're not a beginner level creature and so but I could I could go out and buy a chameleon tomorrow um, but I'd love to know from you where you think is a good sort of entry level if somebody's maybe got a terrarium tried some terrariums, been successful now wants to add some animals into their setup. I mean, I guess, you know, are we talking, are we going as low as something
[12:03] like, uh, some fancy, um, wood lice or are we taking it up a notch slightly? Where, where do we start with this? If you want to go slowly and build up your skills gradually as you should. So, yeah, exactly. That's definitely the right way to go about it. Definitely don't start off with a chameleon or an alligator or something. Start small and work your way up. I only mention alligators because there's a local reptile shop that has an alligator in the shop near here. They've got a huge indoor setup with heat lamps and ultraviolet and a massive pond.
[12:38] Yeah, don't be tempted to jump too far into it, but it's also good to have ambition and have thing to own for. But yeah, you mentioned isopods. I mean, isopods are fantastic. They're really interesting. They'll breed quite readily. They're fairly used to look after, fairly used to feed, and there's some really, really amazing kind of shapes and colours.
[12:59] They're a really good place to start. So yeah, if you have a terrarium already and you have some leaf litter, you could start by adding something like springtails and isopods and they'll just do a really good job of, tackling any mold you know a little bit of mold in a new cerarium is it's fairly normal nothing too much to be worried about, uh springtails will help clear that and yeah isopods tropical wood lice will just kind of charge around eating up leaf litter and clearing up some of detritus in in the tank um, or inside in the cerarium and they're they're really cool they're really interesting to watch um you you could do a whole episode on isopods and yes yes i've definitely.
[13:44] Yeah i i love isopods um there's some really cool ones out there and as you say you can buy them you can get them sent through the mail there's various companies that do it in the here in the uk, and uh they're they're very cool cool animals and very interesting to watch and observe and as you say serving a purpose in the tank as well which is or in the terrarium which is great um, next up from them would it be something i mean i i maybe dart frogs is a bit too too much of a leap but where would we go next if you found yourself comfortable with isopods and their needs is there something to go somewhere to go next, Well, it's funny you mentioned dart frogs. I did make the jump from isocods to dart frogs.
[14:29] If you think of something like a desert dwelling animal, like a beaded dragon or a desert snake, you need to start looking at things like heat lamps, checking you've got the right humidity levels, you've got a warm end, a cooler end of the vivarium. So that can be quite a big jump. But actually something like a dart frog, they like it to be more or less room temperature, a little bit warmer than room temperature. They like high humidity, and they like lots of healthy plant cover. So actually, if you're growing a terrarium and you're doing quite well with that, you're already almost at the point that you're keeping a setup that dart frog could live in. So dart frogs are, in my experience, they're really good fun, they're really interesting.
[15:18] They're not as intimidating as I thought they would be, but they're still not something you should take on lightly. But yeah, they're really fascinating little animals. And if you get smaller ones, you can make them a nice big spacious home without having to build an enormous setup that takes up a load of space. The main thing with any animal, I guess, is thoroughly, thoroughly research that needs humidity, ultraviolet light, heating, what kind of things they eat, what kind of supplements they need to make sure they get enough calcium, vitamin D, vitamin A, all, And you mentioned earlier there's a wealth of information at our fingertips, but as you said, there's also a wealth of disinformation. So I think with anything like this, do lots and lots of research and don't necessarily believe anything you read. If you keep reading that dark fogs need high humidity and that everyone seems to be saying that, that's probably a safe bet. They do want high humidity, so if everyone's saying it, that's probably a reliable piece of information you can believe in, but if you see something that only one or two people are saying then i've really questioned whether that's right or whether they that happens to work for them but it isn't the right way to go so yeah plenty of research is the is probably the way to go yeah.
[16:40] Absolutely and i mean i know certainly from my daughter's experience and my experience with the snake world but you know there's different schools of thought in terms of you know there's there's different camps when it comes to for example feeding snakes when they're young like do you like do you want them to some people are really like feeders and they're, and it seems like a really big division in the snake world it's like oh are you somebody who believes that you want to get that snake up to the maximum size as soon as possible therefore you're going to be feeding it you know um, or are you more do you have a more sort of a different approach where you sort of say well in the wild they wouldn't necessarily be getting this size of prey every week and actually it's better for them you know there's all these different kinds of debates going on and i found it really overwhelming when we first got a snake because um, you know we talking to various people and i had people advising me who were very experienced um snake people on who i knew via instagram and i was like well, we're being told by this place that we need to feed it this much every.
[17:45] X days. And they were like, oh, well, you know, that's a type that's a type of approach to the care that some people take but actually our advice would be don't do that feed it a bit less you know it's like it's really it's like i guess it's like bringing up children you know it's the same thing like there are schools of thought and neither way is probably gonna like kill the snake but at the same time it's these different i don't know if you found this with i don't know if it's the same with dart frogs but certainly in the reptile community for a new owner it's really quite bewildering but as you say that's the key is keep reading keep listening and figure out for yourself and and provide the essentials right the actual essentials that you know like in the case of snakes obviously uv etc etc, but yeah it can be a bit worrying i think you can go down rabbit holes and, convince yourself that yeah you just in a way it's good to actually speak to people and get find people that you trust and that seem to have lots of experience and then it kind of all comes together but yeah um, 100% especially I don't know if you find this with dark frogs but also like the sort of transatlantic issue like there's different terminology in different countries for different things, um yes as well which is confusing, I find yeah I find this with dark frogs and also with terrariums In America, they often refer to peat moss.
[19:12] And I think it's, I can't remember what it.
[19:18] Either sphagnum moss or ground cocoa coir i don't see anything to do with peat and obviously peat is something we we shouldn't be digging up and using in our guys anyway so, yeah if you see some terminology and you're not sure what it means as i said it could be an american phrase that is actually it sounds like something completely different but it's actually exactly of the same thing as what you're using already, so yeah definitely um i suppose that the ideal thing to do if you can is find a breeder or a keeper um in your country wherever that may be um, and so i'm very lucky i've made friends with a guy called brin um and he's he's a fantastic frog keeper i've been to visit his house several times um i've brought some frogs from him and i've I've been able to look at his setup, look at the husbandry, the lighting, the heating, all of that kind of thing. And it's easy to go into a shop and see an animal that looks healthy, but you don't know how long it's been in the shop for. It may have only come in yesterday and the conditions they're keeping it in the shop, you might copy that. And actually, because it's just a temporary holding setup, it may not be quite the right conditions for them. So you should definitely You try and support local shops because they need help, but also you should try and find maybe local breeders you can go visit, have a look at how have you set your tank up.
[20:47] What are you doing about lighting? What are you doing about supplements? What are you doing about quarantining animals before adding them to other animals? That kind of thing. And if you find someone that, if you look at their animals and they're all looking healthy and everything looks good, then they probably know what they're doing and, you can listen to their advice and maybe give that slightly more credence than some of the advice you've seen online that you're unsure about. So yeah, that's always a good bet. Speak to as many people as you can, look at lots of different things and listen to lots of advice and then, hopefully you'll notice some common themes about what things the successful people and the ethical people are doing and that's the way to go.
[21:28] Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And it's the same with plants, isn't it? When you see the plant in the plant shop, it's probably only just arrived. I mean, this is so common on social media and everywhere that, you know, you see people talking about plants and I only really, uh, sounds really judgmental, but I, if somebody, if I can see, and I can, we, you know, you can see once you, once you know that somebody's got plants that are, you know, quite old that have been around like they've been around for a long time and i'm like yeah i'm gonna start trusting your advice because you haven't just got a collection that's two years old and i'm about people who, maybe people who started getting into plants during covid would be terribly uh, critical of that because it's like well of course i don't have any plants well you haven't, you haven't matured in your hobby to get to the stage where you've got a plant that's been around for a really long time and you've you've dealt with the issues that come with that and if you have then, that tells me that you've got an extra level of skills on top you know um.
[22:35] Because it's one thing looking after a plant from the shop and you know they often tend to have a sort of a period where they're sort of, uh you know acclimatizing or whatever and then yeah not necessarily looking great i mean all these uh prayer plants and calatheas and things and i want to see it down the line i want to see it five years down the line, crispy leaves and all the rest of it yeah exactly.
[23:10] If you want to unlock ad-free episodes, bonus content, my festive mail-out, regular posts, there's so much on my Patreon now that actually it's a busy place to be. There's also a planty community there that you can join. So if you want more from On The Ledge, do go and check out patreon.com forward slash On The Ledge. And thank you to the people who've chosen to do that in the last few days and weeks. We've had a bit of a sale on so there's been quite a few of you, Likia, Suzanne and my Trang have all become crazy plant people Jen, Jodie, Joe, Jade, Jessie, Bron and Bebe you don't have to have a name that starts with a J or a B but it helps clearly, have become legends Maureen, AB, Dot, Steph and Kath have become superfans and loads of you have become free members Artem, Noemia, Murtad, Nick, Crashmat, Ellie lots of you there plus Margie and Mary have taken out a free trial I don't know what it is about the matching initials but there just seems to be something in the air anyway thank you to all those people because they keep on the ledge alive and kicking so thank you to all my new and old, Patreon subscribers now back to my chat with Adam.
[24:39] What kind of glass do we have behind you? Is that, in the video, we can see a pallidarium, is it? It is. It's a pallidarium. I don't know if you can see those. There's probably about seven or eight centimetres of water at the bottom. And I have a small waterfall in there. I don't think the camera will pick any of this up because they have quite small details. But I have a small pump at the back and a filter and a heater. And it's circulating the water and it's pumping it back through a waterfall. And there's also a separate um separate bit of irrigation pipe right that comes up to the top and i have effectively a drip wall so i've got some of the water dripping back down, and that's worked really well because by keeping i've used things like cork bark on the back um cork bark is really good enough with aerium or a terrarium because it's it's natural it looks nice it's light and it's very very rock resistant so i've got water kind of constantly trickling over it, it hasn't rotted away.
[25:39] And I've been able to get kind of moss and small ferns and things attached into it. So if you look at any kind of tropical ecosystem, water is obviously a really big part of it, whether it's a river, a waterfall, running water, rainfall, humidity. So to get the real lushness that you can see behind me, having water in there can be really, really good. And a lot of it is patience. This setup is now, I think it's on its fourth version, so originally it was just a big a big uh terrarium, and i tried to have the water feature in there and i tried to kind of almost build like a little well that the water drained back into in the middle so it wouldn't saturate the substrate but of course as the plants grew and the moss grew, the water started getting redirected into the substrate the substrate got really wet and became quite anaerobic, the plants started dying, it smelled terrible. So I tore it all out, rebuilt it, tried something different and that also didn't work. Then I tried a paludarium with rocks and it was fine, but they're a little bit too big and I didn't like the look of it. So I've now kind of gone for smaller rocks and then pieces of driftwood.
[26:59] And I'm much happier with it now, But, that didn't work first time. It didn't even work properly really until the fourth time. So a lot of perseverance and experimentation can be helpful. But yeah, basically I have a small volume of water that's pumping around. Most plants have sent down big long roots down into the water. So I don't need to water anything in there. I have a small number of shrimps and small fish in the water. Uh the waste that they produce um all their waste products go into the water the water gets circulated through the system the plants are taking it up so i don't need to fertilize or feed anything in there i just do periodic water changes, um and i prune i actually pruned it last night so it looked nice and neat for today, and i've taken out half a bucket of plant cut-ups and it's barely made a difference so um when when you get it right these setups can be very all very productive, everything will grow really quickly and grow really well. But it can take sometimes a year or two to get to that point where everything's really as fast as it's set. So yeah, perseverance and patience is probably the way to go.
[28:14] And with this kind of, um, is the biggest investment here, the actual structure, the glass, the glass, um, carapace that you've got there, is that the thing that's going to cost you the most money? And, and is it worth looking kind of secondhand ones of these, if you are on a tight budget, like, can you save some money there? Or is that a false economy? Finding second-hand stuff is definitely a good idea. This is an Exeterra. I think it's the largest Exeterra setup we make.
[28:45] I think brand new, these used to be about £300, £400. But you can often find them on the Facebook marketplace, sometimes for £50, something like that. So it's definitely worth looking around. If you're going to include water, to just take a really close look at all the silicon seals and maybe test it before you set it up in your living room or something.
[29:11] I've heard some horror stories about people buying second-hand setups and they find the silicons failed and end up with a wet carpet and an unhappy family.
[29:21] But yeah, there's some good deals to be found. If you can't find something the right size and shape, you can get Viverian's custom-made. And they're not as expensive as you'd think um, you can even use secondhand aquariums that i suppose the main problem with an aquarium because it's designed to hold an enormous amount of water and to withstand the the weight and the pressure of that, they tend to use very very thick glass which then is obviously very heavy and very expensive so if you got something this kind of size as an aquarium, you could be looking at if you got that, if you got that from the shop you You could be looking at six, seven, 800 pounds for something that size, because it's going to be very thick, heavy glass, but actually this is very thin glass, so you don't need to... It's only got seven or eight centimeters of water, so it doesn't need to hold a huge amount of weight, so the glass could be thin. So, yeah, I would have a look around and find a second-hand bargain. And to your first question about the cost of the setup versus the cost of the content, that probably depends on what stage of the hobby you're at. So some of my first terrariums, you buy a glass enclosure and you put some really basic things like photonias and some small ferns from the garden center that was three or four pounds each.
[30:49] You may find that as you get more and more into this hobby, you end up with rarer and rarer plants and animals. And suddenly you go from buying plants for three or four pounds to plants which are kind of 50, 60 pounds each. And obviously when you're setting up something this size, if you're buying lots of small plants for 50 pounds each, that will very quickly add up to an enormous amount of money. I've seen a few frog breeders that are keeping some quite rare forms of dart frogs, which you'd spend five, six hundred pounds per frog and they're keeping them in kind of plastic tubs, which they bought from Ikea for five quid. But as long as they're able to provide the heat, the humidity, the warmth, the moisture, the food, all the other stuff the animals needed, you could keep a frog in a plastic tub or you could keep it and five thousand pound custom built enclosure.
[31:46] So yeah you don't need to spend fortune and if you want to get some some cool on future plants try and find some find a friend that's got some rare plants you can trade some cuttings and build your collection up in a more sustainable and more affordable way, that's really good advice yeah so many so many generous people who are happy to engage in swaps and things and uh yeah that's a great way and even i i often think sometimes you look at the plants and you think well, i i mean maybe it's just me but i just my thing is i need it to look beautiful not, necessarily because i'm an esthete but because i know that if it looks beautiful i'm going to pay more attention to it and it's going to get better care so it's kind of a virtuous circle for me but i know that i don't necessarily have to have the um the really expensive i could do something really cool with something really um ordinary if you see what i mean like it doesn't just just because something costs 100 quid doesn't make it any more beautiful than the 10 quid plant to me anyway um i guess it depends what your priorities are as you say like if you really want the you know the really expensive plants um then you know you can keep the, the the the thing that they're in can be really really cheap, i just know from my point of view i need it to look good otherwise it's not going to work for me and the way that my brain works.
[33:14] Absolutely as as you said it's it's a virtuous circle um the more the longer you've had the setup running assuming you've got everything set up correctly and the inhabitants are happy, the longer you leave it it will just continue to improve and look more and more established and more and more natural, um the i suppose the frustration setting up something like the display behind me and some of the dark frog setups I've built, is they take a good year to start looking decent.
[33:44] I always think try and buy small plants or cuttings and let them grow the way they want to. If you buy something and put a massive plant in it, it's going to quickly fill a lot of space and look impressive. It hasn't grown to that size and shape in that location, so the conditions may not quite be to its liking. But if you put a small cutting in, if it wants a bit more light, it might climb its way up the background and find a spot where it's happy. I've seen plants going up the background and almost doing like a 90 degree corner because maybe that area is a bit too wet for them and they don't like it and they've moved away, or maybe they've found a place with the lighting to their liking, so um you're probably going to have to go through a phase of, put your cuttings with your small plants in there and just sit back and be patient, i mean when i when i built this setup behind me i agonized over the background i've used loads of um, uh cork bark and i've got some really nice branches i spent ages kind of playing around trying to get the the background to look the way I wanted. I've used expanding foam to effectively lock everything into place. I've carved it, I applied silicon over it, added coco coir. I did all of this to make the background look really natural and now you can't see it.
[35:06] As an experiment, I've done a few tutorials where I've literally used artificial materials. I've used bits of drain pipe, bits of polystyrene. I've covered them in kind of, it's similar to a fabric called Hybrilon, which you get in the States. And it's like a wicking fabric. So I've used a kind of a budget version of that I found on Amazon. So I've made a few setups with completely synthetic materials and they look awful for the first year because you've got bits of foam and bits of polystyrene and it just doesn't look natural at all. But after a year or two, once everything's growing over it, you honestly can't tell. So you could spend hundreds and hundreds of pounds on really nice natural materials, and within a year you won't see them because the plants are so happy they've covered everything. I suppose if you want it to look nice for that first year, buy some proper bits of wood and proper materials and accept that all your hard work will eventually be hidden.
[36:05] If you're not too bothered about that, you might be able to take a few shortcuts and use things like drain pipes and stuff to make fake branches wrapped in hybron, and it will look ugly for a year or so, but once the plants have covered it, you won't know.
[36:20] Yeah that's great that's really great advice now we need to move on to talking about uh where some people might recognize you from which is your work on um the morven flower show uh exhibit which was very very cool and i think was, where maybe where i first came across you tell us about that what did you do, um and what has it opened up for you in terms of new opportunities and uh so on.
[36:48] Yeah, thank you. So yeah, I was at the RHS Malvern show, when was it? May this year, 2020. The way that came about is I was at the show the previous year and I met with a friend of mine called Alina. I actually met her several years prior at a different plant show. We stayed in contact and become friends. She had applied to do an indoor show garden, wasn't accepted that it but she said i'm going to try again would you like to collaborate with me on it so i said yeah sure that sounds really good fun, so she came up with a really good design um and then, well she kind of had she had the basis of the design already for the indoor garden and then worked on it we made some tweaks added a couple of bits we wanted to put lots of terrariums in there, um and we submitted it and we were accepted so the design was called back to grandma's house and it was trying to make a kind of like a warm, cozy, 60s, 70s inspired living room. The kind of place you might have gone to your grandma's house for a cup of tea or something and there'd be house plants and old furniture and stuff. And we wanted to make something as accessible as possible. So sometimes when you go to some of these plant shows and flower shows and things, they can be a bit unobtainable.
[38:14] We did everything on a very tight budget. We brought second-hand bits of furniture from Facebook Marketplace. We brought a second-hand Exoterra Vivarium for one of the displays.
[38:27] We used lots of cuttings, lots of our own plants, lots of second-hand bits and pieces that we acquired. So what we wanted to show is that you could make a nice kind of planted room that would be cozy and relaxing to spend time in and you don't need to spend thousands and thousands of pounds to do it. It can be done on a, not necessarily done cheaply, but it doesn't have to be excessively expensive. And yeah, so we worked on our design, we went and built it, and we were absolutely blown away and absolutely delighted to be awarded a gold medal. And that had only just sunk in that we'd won the gold medal when we also won two further awards as well. So we won the, I can't remember the name the award is the kind of the best in show for the house plant gardens um, and that that particular one is based on the number of points you've scored so because we we'd achieved, um you know a high score we won that award which was amazing and then on the final day we found that we'd also won the people's choice which is where visitors to the show get to vote for their favorite indoor garden outdoor garden borders and so on, and uh we were we were blown away to find that we won that as well So it was an absolutely fantastic experience. And yeah, I got to work with my friend Alina, which is really lovely.
[39:48] And yeah, we came up with this design and it was great seeing it go from a kind of a digital drawing of what we thought it would look like to suddenly being an actual room. You'd go and sit on the sofa, you could look at all the different setups, look at all the different plants and actually enjoy the space. So yeah, really, really amazing experience and I'm super grateful to Alina for asking me to collaborate with her. Super grateful to the RHS for giving us the opportunity and of course to all the lovely people that came and saw it and voted for us. It was such a good exhibit. I really loved it. It felt very relatable, as you say, very cozy, but also had some really nice,
[40:31] plants in there and really nice setups. So maybe, can you share with us maybe your favorite of those.
[40:39] Of the terrariums that you built for that, all the setups that you did? Was there anything that you like, oh, I really, this is like peak me i love this i love this particular piece of of terrarium or something um oh so there were a few, it's really hard to pick so um one of the things i really liked it wasn't actually a terrarium at all it was the living wall so um, when i first um got got set up on instagram years and years ago it was to show off a living wall I'd built in my previous house going up the staircase, and I used to really love that but it was a bit it was in a quite inconvenient place for maintaining it and eventually we moved house and had to take it down, and I kept all the bits for it and when we decided we should have a living wall in this setup and I got all the bits out again and rebuilt it on a small scale, and it was right by the front of the garden so you could kind of see it it was, one of the bigger feats that you kind of get close to and have a look at it. And that was really nice recreating that because I suppose that was my signature set up at one point.
[41:52] But other than that, I really liked there's a terrarium rebuilt. We were very, very lucky. We approached ExoTerra, the company that imports ExoTerra and distributes it in the UK, and they very, very generously donated a couple of their terrariums to us. So one of them, I took a bit of a risk. So I thought if I'm doing a show, I could play it safe and just build a kind of background with caught bark or expanding foam or something. I've done it a million times before. I know how to do it. I know how to make it look fairly nice. But I thought, no, I'm doing this show. I need to push myself and try something new.
[42:37] So what I decided to do is to try and build a buttress root. So I used, and again, using a load of unnatural materials, I used a load of polystyrene, so bits of old recycled polystyrene. You know when you get a new microwave or something, it comes with big blocks of polystyrene. So I stuck one of those in the corner and I used some polystyrene sheets to make the curved buttress roots, like the triangular shaped roots coming down to the floor of the churl. I used an expanding foam to fit in all the gaps and then I carved it roughly to the right shape. And then i used a product it's called milliputs it's like a two-part epoxy putty, and back in my coral farm days i used to use their products a lot i actually had a sponsorship deal with them actually used to provide me with their products for basically making bases to graft the baby corals onto, i thought i wonder if that would work for this because it's it's waterproof it's non-toxic, and it dries rock hard but unlike you could use something like concrete or cement but obviously that's going to leech lots of.
[43:48] It's going to lead to lime and stuff, which may not be good for any plants or animals you put in there. And I knew that millipar is completely non-toxic, completely safe. The only problem is it's the wrong colour, so I had to get a few different colours and kind of blend them to get something roughly the right colour. And then I mixed a little bit up and I kind of coated the structure I'd made. And I used an odd fork to kind of carve bark-like patterns into it, um, and then it dried and it actually it looked pretty good and then i basically planted around it um and left it and then by the time we got to the show it started to establish and it actually looked um, it looked reasonable good i was pretty happy with that uh and i've actually kept that set up and i've actually got a pair of dark frogs living in there now and it it's quite a nice scene and clambering around on this kind of, fairly realistic looking tropical tree root and thinking that's made out of bits of old polystyrene from a microwave and.
[44:50] Epoxy filler that I'd kind of molded it with. So that was quite a satisfying setup.
[44:58] But we had a lot of things there that we really liked. We had lots of cool little setups with some interesting and unusual plants and it's very hard to pick the specifics it, was it was very very cool i really was inspired by what you did there because there were things that were were very very there were more complicated things but they're also very simple ideas uh that you and alina put together that somebody could replicate and did you get you might well you must have got amazing feedback because you got the people's choice so people obviously loved what you did what was the feedback light that you got from members of the public, it was really nice um we got a lot of people saying things like um, you know, oh, the colour on our walls for instance, or the rug on our floor, a particular piece of sofa on a particular piece of furniture. Lots of people would say, oh, you know, my aunt had something like that, my mum had one of those in her house, so that was really nice.
[45:54] People like the plants, we did have some very, very unusual rare plants in there, but we'd also put some really basic ones. So again, we wanted it to be accessible. So we had things like a svatafine piece lily, we had some begonias, we had some African violets, all kind of staples of the houseplant hobby, as well as some kind of quite rare and quite unusual miniature ferns, miniature orchids, mosses, things like that. So yeah, we had some lovely feedback. We had a few kind of fun pieces. So one of the things I created was I had an old lava lamp, so I cleaned that all out and.
[46:40] I used maramo moss balls suspended on bits of fishing lines, all kind of hanging like puppets from the top of the lava lamp. So it kind of looked like the little balls of moss, like little bits of green wax floating around. So we had that and people seem to quite like that. So we had a few kind of, dare I say slightly gimmicky things, but they made people smile and it just shows that there's a million and one different ways to grow plants. And that was one of the things we wanted to show people. We had plants in pots, which is what everybody does, but then we had things like the living wall. We had some staghorn ferns, which Alina planted up onto wooden boards hanging from the wall. We had some picture frames that I created with air plants. We had the terrariums, we had the lava lamp, we had an Ikea cabinet that Alina and I built. We wanted to show that if you want to keep plants, you don't have to just put them in a pot and put it on a windowsill, there's all these other ways of doing it. And we had an aquascape as well and some aquatic plants. So straight away there's seven or eight different ways you could grow plants in your home. It doesn't just have to be a plant in a pot.
[47:54] That's very cool. I mean, I think your work speaks for itself. You did a brilliant job and you got lots of awards. So more power to elbow. Are you going to do any more exhibits like that again? Has it whetted your appetite? It definitely has um i mean, when we did this alina and i said even if we don't win any prizes at all it will be a cool experience it'll be good fun just to be able to say hey we did a we did a show garden an rhs show it's it's quite a cool thing to be able to do, um we didn't go into it with the expectation of winning anything really so to have won three awards, was was really lovely it was a really nice experience but it wasn't what we were expecting, and we genuinely didn't do it for the sort of the fame and glory in the awards as it were we we just wanted to share our love of houseplants and show how different ways you can grow plants and different things you can do, um but having said that yeah now we've done that we're both very keen to do to do future gardens of some sort, um alina and i have spoken a little about whether we're going to you know do another garden in the future, that's a possibility.
[49:08] We're definitely open to doing more of that kind of thing in the future. So yeah, hopefully it's the main thing we hope is that it's inspired people, but hopefully it might give us both a few options to do this kind of thing in the future if we wanted to. Absolutely. Well, I really hope you do, because I think it was so inspiring and there were so many great ideas in there. And it was accessible, as you say. It wasn't something that you looked at and thought, oh, well, this is lovely, but I can't do any of this at home.
[49:37] It was very accessible and relatable. So that was a real triumph. And well done. But it's been a delight to chat to you today, Adam. Just let listeners and viewers know before I let you go, where can we find more Adam? Where do you exist in the world of the internet?
[50:01] Well, thank you very much. So, yes, I'm on Instagram. My handle on there is, at earthchampion, all one word. I'm also on TikTok and I've branched out into YouTube. I'm at earthchampionecosystems, again, all one word on YouTube. Um i've actually got uh i've got a few videos which i've been working on with a friend of mine in the last few months so we have a few videos showing how we built some of the setups including the the one i mentioned with the buttress roots, and so those are going to be online soon, and i'm running a bit behind with content because um i've actually had laryngitis and i've lost my voice pretty much the last almost the last couple of months um as you know we've had to reschedule this um recording, it's been a journey to get to this interview hasn't it but it's been absolutely worth it it's been a delight to chat to you ad and i'm glad your voice held out and um thank you so much for joining me and i think we're gonna um, record a little bit extra for our patreon subscribers too so um, i'm looking forward to that but thank you so much for joining me today thank you for having me i've really enjoyed it it's um it's great to be part of this and, uh I hope I can help spread the word about the pleasure of keeping plants and keeping animals under glass. It's something everyone should try. It's so accessible.
[51:27] A terrarium doesn't have to be big or complicated. It could be as simple as a jam jar with some moss in it, or it could be as complicated as the Eden Project, which is effectively a terrarium. It could be something enormous that you can walk in that's got animals running around. It's such a fun hobby. It should really give it a go I'm always here to try and champion that and encourage people yeah thank you so much Adam what a great message to end on thank you for joining us thank you.
Jane Perrone talks with Adam Critien aka @earthchampion about the joys and challenges of keeping plants and animals under glass, from simple terrariums to more advanced vivariums and paludariums. Where do you start? What can go wrong? And why do animals add such interest when kept under glass with plants? Plus Adam talks about the award-winning show garden he built with Alina Hibbert at this year’s RHS Malvern Show - Back to Grandma’s House.
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This week’s guest
Adam Critien aka @earthchampion on Instagram and @earthchampionecosystems on YouTube keeps houseplants plus fish, dart frogs & a tortoise. He is probably best known for co-creating the multi-award winning RHS Malvern show garden Back to Grandma’s House with Alina Hibbert, which we discuss in this episode. Find out more about Adam on his website.
Adam’s paludarium combines water, plants and animals. Click to enlarge. Photograph: Adam Critien
Timestamps
00:00 - Sorting prop boxes and finding surprise plant treasures
01:16 - Tradescantia outdoors in summer, indoors in winter
03:04 - Why it matters to make the recording work
05:55 - Introducing plants and animals under glass
07:01 - The biggest terrarium mistake: overwatering
08:13 - What to do if there is too much water in the setup
09:33 - Childhood fish tanks, sticklebacks, and early wildlife curiosity
11:11 - Why animals in the home raise the stakes
12:42 - Adam’s route from fish keeping to vivariums and paludariums
15:22 - How social media has changed access to information
16:39 - Best beginner animals: isopods and springtails
18:44 - Why dart frogs can be a sensible next step
20:08 - Research, misinformation, and checking care advice
21:02 - Reptile care debates and conflicting advice
23:29 - Country-specific terminology and peat moss confusion
24:21 - Why local breeders and experienced keepers are worth learning from
26:20 - Judging plant advice by the age and stability of the collection
27:35 - Building a paludarium with water flow, cork bark, and moss
28:54 - Why patience matters and why the setup took four versions
31:26 - Second-hand enclosures, silicone seals, and budget options
33:16 - When the cost shifts from the enclosure to the plants and animals
36:03 - Starting with small plants and letting them choose their place
37:25 - Hiding structure behind growth over time
39:39 - The RHS Malvern show garden, Back to Grandma’s House
41:54 - Winning multiple awards, including gold and People’s Choice
43:45 - Favourite display elements, including the living wall and desert terrarium
48:23 - Public feedback and making the show feel accessible
50:59 - More show gardens in the future?
52:52 - Where to find Adam online
54:02 - Final thoughts on why everyone should try enclosed growing systems
Back to Grandma’s House at the Malvern Spring Festival
Back to Grandma’s House at the Malvern Spring Festival
CREDITS
This week's show featured Whistle by BenJamin Banger (@benjaminbanger on Insta; website benjaminbanger.com).