Reptile Forum, Reptile Classifieds - CaptiveBred

arthur cooke · Posted: Mon Jan 07, 2008 3:35 pm Post subject:

Hi, I found bark of any sort a bit dangerous in that one of my rough greens died through ingesting bark.
If you decide to go for a naturalistic type viv, then the planting medium needs to be plant friendly as well as reptile friendly. many tropical plants need a miniature symbiotic fungi, which you can buy, look up Costa Recan seed co, sorry bout spelling. they do a range of tropical plant seeds as well. I hope I'm not stating the obvious by saying that light is important so shade tolerant plants are the best and many house plants are shade tolerant, my best growers have always been from the fig family, the paddle leaf fig is a good one for a large viv,under good conditions it's a fast grower and you can keep the leaves clean easerly. It doesn't seem to need a lot of feeding, feed mine twice a year. It does like a nice root run. Weeping fig is also quite good, you can buy them really cheap from Ikea and they seem to be in better condition than the ones in garden centres.
Rubber trees are good but slow growers and will need a bit more light. Under planting is a bit more difficult, the best growers seem to like it cooler, mind your own business, creeping fig, moss etc. 85F is about the highest temperature plants will withstand for any length of time, they need a nightly temp drop. Also many plants don't like wet leaves overnight, they need to breath and exhale, water temp when you are spraying is also important because the water need to be at much the same as the temp on the leaf. I think it has something to do with air pressure.
For my own substrate I use multi purpose compost mixed with dead leaves, beech leaves are good, a bit of sand helps drainage, also I found that by adding worms it helped stop the substrate from compacting and also helps feed the plants by dragging down some of the waste products. Some orchids, like the jewel orchid will do well and are cheap. But a bit delicate. A good place for orchids is the RHS annual Orchid show, usually in March in London. Also you can get good advice at the show,also a good source for spraying equipment.
cheers arthur