Soil for live plants?

Hydro and organic fert. 3:1:1 peat moss, vermiculite and perlite. Usually a different ratio but you don’t want a ton of drainage getting into substrate. Use bone meal, blood meal, pelleted chicken poo, etc for the fert. Act like you are doing organic potted hydro. Perlite will help with drainage and vermiculite will help the peat retain moisture. Get good peat or coco husk, or you will end up with a lot of drainage and not absorption. Don’t add compost like you usually would for outdoor hydro. Lighting is going to be a challenge unless you go LED in the right spectrums.

Or just do straight hydro in a self sealed container. Add an air stone if desired. Google growing peppers in hydro and the most popular videos are what I am talking about. Can’t remember his name but he grows and clones in pretty much any container, even baby wipe tubs.

Never done live plants in a tank for snakes, just what I would investigate before doing it.


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The OP is just doing potted plants which are going to require repotting yearly anyways so just something like a plain potting soil should work fine.

Now i agree, if you are going bioactive, then you will need much more. If you are going bioactive, my advice is join the Reptile Bioactive FB page. They have files there for sets ups from deserts to jungle floors to marshland along with plants that are good for said climates/setups as well as plants that are safe for reptiles and amphibians and the different types of isopods and clean up crews. When i was looking at going bioactive for Pats cage, i joined them and learned a lot but i ended up probably not going that route and just sticking to potted plants that i will just re pot yearly.

And as for plants in snake cages, you need a hardy plant that is low growing like Pothos. Even the Pothos I had in Rosey. Vicky and Caesar's cages got destroyed lol. The snakes loved them but when a 15 lb or so snake decides to try and sit on the plant, you will get damage. They work well in the smaller snakes' cages more or less. Louie and Gina have managed to break off leaves here and there but overall, the plant is still doing good.

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Originally Posted by Sauzo

I would think it would fine. I just use organic potting soil that i showed the pic of. Works well and doesnt have a strong odor to it. I have a couple gold pothos, jade pothos, njoy pothos and a prayer plant on its last leg which is about to get thrown into the yard waste can lol. Only things i can keep alive are pothos haha.

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Yeah.. ill take your word for it... if i want to grow pothos.

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Originally Posted by Apiratenamedjohn

Yeah.. ill take your word for it... if i want to grow pothos.

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Lol pothos is all i can grow. I can kill a plant by just looking at it :D

Oh and i did manage to kill even a pothos....well it was a combined effort from me and Rosey. Me over watering it and Rosey plopping her 13 lb butt on top of the plant all the time.

The plants I keep, I typically have to make my own mixture of soil. The organic mix you buy off the shelf doesn't typically drain well enough for my applications. For succulents I used to just add sand, but it's evolved a bit since then.

This is the substrate mix I used for my ball python's viv, but it should work (in theory) in a potted plant mix. I've put it in with my big pothos plant and it's doing great, but as stated above pothos can survive pretty much anything lol.

2 parts organic potting soil
1 part sand
1 part mix of spagnum moss and coco chips

Which is just an approximation, because I didn't exactly measure each part out, but did it by feel. I wanted something that had nutritional value (sphag moss, coco chip) but good drainage (sand), and the potting mix was my base. I also shouldn't have to add fertilizer, because my clean up crew will do that for me, but you may want to look into organic fertilizers like worm castings to give your plants a little boost as time goes on.

There are literally a million ways to do it, and this is what I've had success with so far. Hope it helps!