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Living plants in a tank?

R

RaidenTheAlmighty

New member
I was thinking about this while I was looking at some of the potted plants I have. Of them, two of them really stand out in my mind as being perfect for a snake cage. The first one is a small bromeliad that I've had for over a year. It has stayed the same size and the same shade of green for the whole year. The brilliant thing about it is that it requires virtually no care. I'm fairly certain I could get a similar plant to grow in a small pot of eco earth fairly easily.

The next plant that inspired me was the philodendron that is growing in the house. I like it because it has grown out of control and his has managed to stay confined to a piece of wood. I think I could do something similar in the tank by growing it on an arching branch or something like that. Both of the plants grow in the corn snakes natual range, so I doubt there would be any health issues.

What do you guys think?
 
I'm not sure whether it would work or not though I think it would be more trouble to keep clean with live plants involved. If you find that it works though, please post. I've been considering using a couple of live plants (air plants as they are called) just to spice things up a bit. The reason I was looking at air plants is because they don't require the root space that a tropical plant would.
http://www.airplantcity.com/index.html <--- Has some info on what I'm referring to.
 
I tried it for a while. Plants need UV to survive which Corns don't, so the first thing you need is a "rota" so you can swap them in and out of the tank in order to keep them alive.

Next, my Corns just saw them as more climbing equipment. Most were flattened within a couple of weeks and all of them were knocked over at one time or another and got potting compost all over the place. Great when combined with a slide through the water bowl - plenty of muddy trails for Mom to clean up!

As you can tell, I gave up!

If you want live plants in the tank then I think you probably need to go for it as a wholesale project. Looks fantastic but seems a lot of work to set up. Try reading "The Art of Keeping Snakes" by Philippe de Vosjoli (available from Amazon).
 
bitsy said:
If you want live plants in the tank then I think you probably need to go for it as a wholesale project. Looks fantastic but seems a lot of work to set up. Try reading "The Art of Keeping Snakes" by Philippe de Vosjoli (available from Amazon).
Click to expand...

This!

I would also recommend either a simple sutup of full blown viv with a BAS (Bio Active Substrate). In between systems are not going to last, and in my humble opinion, be too much trouble. The plants die and they are harder to keep clean. "The Art of Keeping Snakes" is a must read if you are considering a Euorpean style natural vivarium.

After keeping Crested Geckos the natural way I can attest to the benefits. One reason I haven't tried it with corn snakes is that natural vivariums need to be rather large in comparison to the animal to function properly. I wouldn't try to keep a colubrid like this in anything smaller than a 55 to 75g gallon tank or it's equivalent...
 
So, I had this silly idea to try to "bonsai" a couple of plants for my tank. This is obviously a long term plan, but I think it might have some interesting results. I went out and decided to harvest a few plants that I will try to grow and keep relatively small. I collected a couple of pieces of bamboo, as well as two southern live oak saplings and I place them into small containers of pearlite to hopefully stimulate root development.

Once I get some roots growing, I will shift them into pots to help them get a bit hardier than they are now. I know the bamboo is going to grow fast but my money is on the live oak, because the grow fast, but they're also sturdy and thick. I also have a small blueberry plant that I picked up earlier this year. The crown of the plan is only about a foot high and it's actually starting to look like a mini tree in it's own right. It might be pretty cool to try to bonsaify.
 
RaidenTheAlmighty said:
So, I had this silly idea to try to "bonsai" a couple of plants for my tank. This is obviously a long term plan, but I think it might have some interesting results. I went out and decided to harvest a few plants that I will try to grow and keep relatively small. I collected a couple of pieces of bamboo, as well as two southern live oak saplings and I place them into small containers of pearlite to hopefully stimulate root development.

Once I get some roots growing, I will shift them into pots to help them get a bit hardier than they are now. I know the bamboo is going to grow fast but my money is on the live oak, because the grow fast, but they're also sturdy and thick. I also have a small blueberry plant that I picked up earlier this year. The crown of the plan is only about a foot high and it's actually starting to look like a mini tree in it's own right. It might be pretty cool to try to bonsaify.
Click to expand...

Remember when first planting you are going to need to go small and sparse. Plants that grow fast are not going to be well suited for something like this because they are going to quickly outgrow the space you have.
 
I've done some research on the subject as well and found somebody who had potted plants in his viv. He kept them in pots with holes in the bottom and covered the top soil with a elmers glue / aquarium gravel mix. It kept the snakes from burrowing through the soil and weighted (sp? LOL) the planters down so they couldn't knock them over. Every week he'd lift the plants out of the viv, put them in a saucer of water to let the soil soak up and placed them back in the viv.

That's what I wanted to do with mine, except that I found outdoor Mod-Podge that I wanted to mix the aquarium gravel with.

As for the plants in your first post, I know that your Bromeliad for sure is safe to use in the viv as I've seen it mentioned on numerous other forums and links :)
 
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