My own DIY terrarium invention! Bloody proud of it :3

[taira]

It took over a week to make, exuberant amounts of patience, all by hand and by myself with nothing but CD boxes, bunch of screws, a hand drill, a rounded file, and a couple of pieces from a broken old tape stand for a sturdy bottom! There were moments I thought it would never work out but I persisted and now I'm very excited to share the final result!

 

So..
By now for a month or so my Adrian was living in a 2 and a half litre jar, with bandage/cheesecloth on top. It was nice but.. first, the opening was just about enough to squeeze my one hand through so tedious for cleaning, arranging etc., and secondly I kept noticing he tends to stick to the higher parts or even directly the top, more frequently than the usual for snails and their always going up tendency. So I thought, maybe it's stuffy and he's not getting enough air? Maybe he's not happy with space being taller than it is wide? Not any particular sign of discomfort really but I felt there should be something more. To buy a terrarium.. either too big, or too small, or again with ventilation holes only in one place, or full aquarium or for turtles that doesnt even have a lid.. uuuh. Ordering online would cost an arm and a leg in delivery.. So I said well goddamnit, I will just make my own!

I had the general concept, the design and the engineering thought.. Didn't even google anything about diy enclosures/terrariums, just had the idea and got down to it.

Even interchanging backdrops. I had the "vision" but just wasn't entirely confident how exactly to put it together. Luckily after starting drilling holes, the rest started coming too. Most importantly was the idea I want the CD boxes bent backwards, so as the construction is coming together, to have the smooth, straighter sides towards the snail, not to have to crawl over all those nooks and crannies and edges on the inside of the boxes.

Backs and fronts of the boxes were already folding, you know, so easy to form corners and even how the lid would be. Another important thing was that when bent, there is a big gap where they fold but not big enough for the snail to come out, so I realised this would be perfect ventilation! And to make sure he has abundance of air, I still drilled holes as well, also a bit for like style/decoration. It took some trial and error with drilling, definitely manual drills are trickier than electric but I only have a manual one so accepted the challenge. Another useful surprise along the way was the cd boxes already had some holes on the small edges that aligned great vertically so I didn't even need to drill, just file them a little and perfect fit for screwing them together.



While it was in progress, there were wobbly parts, shaky.. But to my astonishment the final result is nothing like it, it's fully stable and steady. I tested it with putting a small rubber ball inside, closing everything and shaking it around as much as I can and everything remained in place! Hooray! It was moving tiiiime!~



The only sort of unfinished bit is the latching. I'm still thinking how to make it, sticking to my 0 budget condition and to the fact it's a SNAIL, it's not going to exert some big force to run away hahaha so it should be just some clip. For the moment I'm using two mini hair clips, or sometimes just putting this fibre lamp on it, it's very light but heavy enough that the lid doesn't open if you nudge it from under.



And that is it. Ingenuity! out of sheer poverty, haa 💪 But to be honest, I'm mega happy how it turned out. In a couple of weeks I'll be able to afford whatever readymade terrarium I want but I don't think I'll get any after all. The one I made is so custom, with so much thought and time in it, I really put my heart into it, and it's so totally unique in a way that I don't think I'd find anything more suitable. And something this lightweight, dismantable and easy to clean and arrange too! And what is coming next are some decent actual planted plants. Now that there's enough space for more soil, I'm absolutely sharing some of my vegetable seeds with Adrian's new enclosure

Here's some bits of Adrian exploring, and exploring, and exploring.. Truly, to him it must be like moving from a bedsit to a manor haha XD

[Symphony]

That's so cool! I love it! Adrian is a lucky little guy to have such a dedicated owner. Please update with how the veggies are growing if you plant them, I am interested in planting some myself but am not sure how well that's going to work with overturning the soil and egg searching.

[taira]

Thank you 😊 Well actually they were two, couple of weeks after I found Adrian, I found another one, which after observations I came to the conclusion its more girl-inclined, called her Willa. Unfortunately, just a few days before I finished this endeavour she.. passed away. I'm guessing just old age. Given nothing was lacking in terms of care, environment, food etc. that would be the only explanation. Would also explain why she was absolutely ignoring Adrian's "advances" (that was awkward to watch lol), why she was always like sleepy and lazy.. This is the problem with found snails, you can never know at what stage in their life you're getting them. With any sickness or parasites ruled out after the first two days in separate enclosure to check everything, I guess she was just.. old 🤷‍♀️ So I never got to finding eggs, although I was excited about it. Adrian is alone agaiiin.. But I'll find a companion, won't be for long.

As for growing veggies.. well together with snails, don't expect to go much beyond sprouts haha. They eat it before it really turns into a full plant. So be ready to be changing seeds often. So far from directly seeds I've put lentils and lettuce. The lettuce I guess got eaten even underground haha, burrowing and gnawing, yay. The lentils went further but as soon as the small leaves started showing up, I've seen him "parkour"-ing from the stick to reach them, eating them like no tomorrow haha. So plant things that you'd want them to eat really really fresh, starting from the very sprouts.
Other I tried was some parsley and dill but for some reason he's not very into them. Another thing you can do, and that borders a bit on normal gardening, is plant somewhere else, like in a pot or something, and when it grows a bit, transfer some of it with its bunch of soil and roots. It works with lettuce, arugula, Kreuzkraut (sorry, don't know it in English..), dandelions and just.. grass, that one that grows in tufts. This way you can have more grown plants and bigger leaves for them to eat and crawl around, sleep under etc. In this case its important to use the same type of soil and keep equal moisture so the re-rooting catches, otherwise it will just dry out and die and can make a mess cleaning the soil, and its spoiling a good plant. Patience and trial and error. The good thing is even if it doesn't work the first time, it's no harm to the snails, depending what it is, they might still enjoy the roots or just burrowing among them. If you haven't dealt with gardening or stuff like that before, start with small-leaved microgreens. They're very easy to handle, grow insanely fast and are generally safe (except peas, beans and onion) for snails.