DIY Terrarium Project (1)

so it begin when @thesimplylife once suggested, “it would be awesome if we had terrarium in our workplace”. well, plants in homes and workplaces help reduce stress, they said. i saw many cute terrariums displayed both in photographs and illustrations too, so based from those tempting visual images it’s not that hard convincing other coworkers about this idea. thus we begin our amateur research.

*image above were terrariums on @thesimplylife’s desk

at first we plan to buy already-built-in terrarium.

but it was pretty pricey. well beauty equal price i suppose? what we bought from those trusted terrarium vendor was not only their plants and their cute miniature displays, we also bought their skill and craftsmanship. but we are pretty cheapskate and gutsy. we try other option: do a trial and error project building some terrariums do it yourself.

from visual observation and some browsing through internet, we knew that we at least need

• container (glass jars, fancy tin can or bottles, or whatever)
• soil
• succulent plants
• activated carbon
• moss

i asked @freyralfheimr for confirmation, since she’s usually more knowledgeable than me in planting plants [her major were landscape architecture]. she said both moss and activated carbon are optional. Sally, Dezi tried searching through tokopedia [local online shop] to locate nearest place which sell succulents and gardening tools, since nearest local market has no selection about them. We met this particular shop, but their item price pretty eye popper so we didn’t immediately place our orders. instead we’re waiting until it’s time for Dezi and me to do our monthly homecoming to Bandung. We knew several place near our respective house which sell plants and gardening tools in reasonable price.

So both Dezi and me went home.

In my house in my hometown at Cimahi, i was surprised because Mom actually grows many succulents at our house.

but they were too big for terrarium. thankfully, Dezi found the right sized plants, in right price too XD

Caitlyn helps by offering us some corals from her unused aquarium.

i scraped some moss and contain them in tiny fancy jar i could found at my house. Monday at our office we operated our project.

Resulting these >>

mine still untouched though.

we still don’t know what would happen next since we didn’t use activated carbon yet. would the plants decayed? would they survived? “The charcoal will improve the quality of your little world including reducing bacteria, fungi and odors.” said this article. I might made another long post about this later >,<)9