My Orchid Terrarium Progress

[Turtle81]

Hi, I decided to start this as a place to show the construction process of my orchid terratium, you can see my initial designs in this post: Advice on layout of foam terrarium insert ?

This is the unit before i started:

The next step was to make up a tempory mockup that was just held together with tape to see what it looks like in the tank:

The foam you can see was collected from the bin outside my local electrical goods company (from around fridges/tv's etc) for free with their permission.
So i spent the afternoon cutting out the shapes and decided to not counter sink the pots yet instead to just make the top platforms the right hight in relation to each other but make the clearance at the bottom lower so that the tops of the pots will be sitting at the right hight.

Now its time to see if i can get it in the uint in one peice !! as you can see bellow the plants will stay the same hight once finished, the next step will be to cut the holes to counter sink the pots below the surface and to pack the bottom level up to the correct hight.

I decided that i like the step hight's but am a little concerned about the over all hight, i would prefer to have the plants a bit lower only i just drop the light levels down to far as it is i am only getting about 8000 lux on my light meter when reading at the level of my lower plants (12 inch). I am running 3x 6500k HO 24W T5 bulbs and one 10000K HO 24W T5 bulb, i thought that that was going to be enough but think i might need to get some LED lights to help suppliment the lights without driving up the power bill ... peoples thoughts? from what i read i need 2000fc (21000 lux!!) although i have heard some people have grown them under 3x 24W HO at 12 inches?

Next update in a week or so

[WhiteRabbit]

Very cool!

[Tetouan]

Awesome. Great job!!

[nenella]

Super!!!! It's going to be really cool! Sorry I can't help you But I, really look forward to your updates and seeing what you do as I have the same sort of Terrariums except mine are not as deep as yours and also mine are ultra basic... and not pretty!
Thanks for posting!

[Magnus A]

Hi
For the light you should look out for the leaf color. If it turns dark green you have to little light.

For the fc count in on the internet there are several ways it is measured. Those insane amount of light is maximun levels during the day, the avarage is much lower and you can debate if the plant accually can harvest all that energy during short time.

So my advice on lightning, stay with what you have and observe how your plants react. If I see correctly you have some cattleyas and those will react on light level, dark green to little and light healthy green enough.

[Turtle81]

Ok so it has been a while since i started this so decided over the weekend to get some more done. I decided that having the three stacks of platforms was going to be to high so i have cut it down to two platforms as you will see later on. So my next step then was to cut my holes out for the plants, once i saw the layout i trimmed the number of plants in the enclosure to 6 so things were not crammed in. I then started gluing the walls onto the sections using liquid nails, as you can see i needed to use pins to hold the pieces in place until the glue set.



I decided to be tricky with the plant holders and make them so that they will hold two different sized pots this was done by cutting the smallest piece out of the middle and then cutting the larger size out leaving a donut shaped piece that will slide in and out. The images below show this as well as the "boulders" i have glued on the edge to keep it from falling through




I repeated for the other 4 holes as above.



I decided that i did not like the flat straight surface of the base so i attached a loop of wire to an old soldering iron so it would heat up and i could cut channels into the foam surface making rock like patterns (this was done outside for good ventilation !!) i then trimmed the edges off so it was not such a sharp edge



That is it up to now, another update when more progress is made hope your enjoying it

[Lagoon]

Lookin Good!!!! Its always fun to see the projects folks put their hands into. Please keep the progress pics comming.These threads are always a kick

[Turtle81]

Ok it’s been a while and now the Xmass rush is over this is the final section of the project finally posted.

The next step was to cover the foam in a sealant with some texture, for this is used a product called foam coat and added paint to give it a colour so I could tell the different coats apart, as you can see below I started with a orange/brown that I did not like so ended up with a black colour. I had earlier found out on a dry run that I could not fit it in the front door of the unit so I had to cut in half so it could get it in !!



This is what it looked like once it was finished but without the waterproof sealer, those “rock” rings are removable for bigger pots as the plants grow.



These are the final shots once it was finished with the pots in, as you can see the “rock” rings were not actually used as by the time I got it finished the orchids were needing to be re-potted (they are sitting in the bigger pots waiting to be re-potted when I get time)




The setup is working a treat with a LOT of new growth (I’ve been amazed) and I’m quite happy with the way it looks in black even if it’s not as natural as I was going to do at the beginning. These are some pics of the flowers I have got so far since the colour is washed out in the one above