Prepping my Terrarium (part 2)

Step 1: Cleaning

After opening the Exo-Terra Rainforest Habitat kit, I gave everything a good wash-down. The starter kit manual suggested the following :

Soak all plants and decoration with a solution of 1 part bleach to 30 parts water for about an hour once a month, which I did, except for the foam background and the jungle vine. I thought they might be too absorbent.

I find this kind of high on the bleach. One of the PetSmart reps said I could definitely get away with a smaller amount of bleach, but I decided to get Fluker's Super Scrub, which is an organic cleaner that "cleans and sanitizes" tanks, branches, rocks, vines, and bowls. To be fair, I did try to the bleach solution on my first batch of plants and decor, but I left them rinse well and sit for, so far, four days.

A point here regarding the Exo-Terra Jungle Vine (show in the image to the right):
I let my vine soak, not in the bleach solution though, for well over an hour to get the excess dyes out. This would be especially important if I were going to have it in an aquatic environment to avoid discolouration of the water, and maybe even negative effects to the critters.

Once everything was clean and free of the smell of plastic and bleach, I cleaned out the tank with a 50/50 mixture of water and vinegar (also recommended in the manual). The vinegar smell goes away pretty quick, too.

Weather or not I will continue to use these two home-brew solutions now that I have Fluker's Super Scrub, I haven't decided yet.

Just for the record, this is also when I installed my Exo-Terra Heat Wave, since it adheres to the bottom outside of the tank. (See Step 3)

Step 2: Decorating

So next, I added the Exo-Terra Rock Background in and placed my plants more how I wanted them to be in the final product.

I'd like to point out here that, although I do like Exo-Terra products, the suction cups that were provided for the Exo-Terra Croton and the Exo-Terra Amapallo were pretty useless, which suited me since I wanted to have the stems wedged into the background foam. Also, you have to kind of take all advertisement with a grain of salt; the rock background shown here on their website looks MUCH more realistic than the actual product, which is still nicer than having a picture taped to back of the tank.

You'll notice in the picture to the left, the jungle vine has been removed temporarily.

This is also when I placed my two thermometers and hygrometer. (Step 3)

Also, I want to add how much I really like the Boston Fern included in the kit. All the plants really, I found to look very good for plastics.

The final result was something to this effect:



Notice in the close-up what I mean about the background looking a little less rocky and a little more foamy. Still though, like it!



The last step of decorating was the addition of a small fake branch by All Living Things. You want suction cups? This thing has two, and combined, you could raise the Titanic with these them! I added it to the left-hand side of the tank to assure an artistic look of symmetry that my future gecko will have plenty of things to climb on. I'm not sure what plant the branch tries to emulate but it looks like ivy to me.

Huzzah, the final product! Please note that I will be waiting till the last minute to add the Exo-Terra Plantation Soil Tropical Substrate, which was also included in the kit.


To be continued in part 3 (because it's starting to take too long to upload these damn images into one post.)