A 4K view inside Ragusea's happy place

So, a couple years ago, I had a midlife crisis and my wife told me that I could uh do anything with fish tanks that I want. Uh I just need to keep it outside. And that struck me as a perfectly reasonable compromise. Um and I have fully capitalized on my end of the bargain there, as you can see. So, um you know, greenhouse is looking pretty good right now. Uh I thought I'd give y'all a tour. Um, some of you who watch uh my channel have seen some of these tanks before. They're all kind of mature now. And so, um, you know, I can show you a lot of progress and tell you some interesting things that I've learned. Um, you know, that even if you're not a fish tank nerd, that would just be, you know, interesting to anyone interested in biology. Um, I also think that you could just turn off the volume right now and put on some music and just use this as chill out content if you want. I tried to sort of make it suitable for both purposes. So, um, the greenhouse, the greenhouse itself, um, was already on the property when we we bought the house. It is like a modular thing that you can order on the internet from the, uh, little cottage company, I think it's called, in Millersburg, Ohio. # Not an ad, but but a fan. Um, really love it. Um, the best thing is all of the windows that all can be independently opened and closed, as you can see, and there's the Dutch door there in the front. Um because the main way that you you know stabilize the temperature in here all through the year in East Tennessee is through opening and closing windows strategically. Um and then for the coldest you know two months of the year uh I do run a space heater. Um and and of course you know the the the the tanks are all heated with water heaters right um that are integrated into the filters. Um so it's temperature control is not as hard as as you would think. And and indeed the water itself acts as a a heat sink, right? That um just a huge amount of mass that stabilizes the temperature um in the greenhouse all year long. And so uh I love how it looks at night especially. Um but yeah, so longtime viewers uh will recognize the centerpiece there in the middle, the metal trough on the floor there. So I don't know. I think um when I first started this, I didn't want to like commit to an aquarium. Like somehow that seemed like a bigger deal. Um I was just like, I'm just going to go I just want to have something to put fish in. Um I just went to the hardware store and bought a container. And um and I've actually always really those um what I presume are galvanized steel troughs. Oh, look at my my water lily blooming there. Um it blooms so briefly. Um, anyways, the the troughs, I've always just kind of admired them as like design objects. Um, they just have this very like mid-century Detroit automotive kind of look to them that I I just think is hit. Okay, so the centerpiece there that's been really uh uh incredible is the um umbrella palm. It's it's sold as that as a house plant. It's actually a member of the same uh genus as the papyrus plant that you know the Egyptians made the first like proto paper on. Um, and I just I just plopped the pot directly into the trough. Did nothing to it. The root ball completely subsumed the pot. It's still like buried in there somewhere. Um, and I have to constantly knock back the root ball to keep it from taking over the entire trough. It is ridiculously happy. And I'm always harvesting fronds off of it, you know, um, pruning it. Um, which is good cuz that means that it's filtering my water, right? Um, the aquarium nerds will know what I mean when I say that I I've had undetectable nitrates in there since I I built it, right? Like it's it's h all the fish poop gets sucked up by the plants. No problemmo. Uh everything is and span clean. And indeed um the whole uh greenhouse is just sort of it it always looks nice. Um it's just not normally this clean. I cleaned it up because um I shot all of this uh footage for a presentation that I had to give to well I was invited to give I was delighted to give to my local uh aquatics club uh East Tennessee Aquatics Association. Uh shout out to those guys. Thanks for that was fun. Um so anyway, that's that's why I cleaned up the the greenhouse and made it look a little bit less mad science lab um to shoot. Um, if you are thinking about spring cleaning right now, you might consider the sponsor of this video, which is Helix Sleep, the maker of my new mattress. Did you know that a 7-year-old mattress can contain more than 16 million colony forming units of bacteria per square in? A way to make sure that your sleep is as uh fresh as possible is to uh get yourself a fresh mattress like I did with Helix Sleep. The cool thing about them is that uh they come in the mail, right? Like they ship them to your house in a box, which is like wild. And you don't need like movers or anything. You just uh you and a friend for a king-size. Uh you haul it into place and then you just break the vacuum seal on it and it expands. And it's not like an air mattress or something. It's like it's a real mine is us hybrid spring and foam mattress that is ridiculously plush and comfy. Love that sucker. Not surprising given that the uh Dusk was selected for me on the basis of uh my filling out the Helix Sleep quiz, which you can do at helixleep.com/regusia right now. Uh they really do have a lot of different options. Uh you know, big and tall mattresses, uh mattresses for kids, and uh also they have new mattress toppers. Uh they just sent me a new one that uh you can put on like any mattress like a like a non-H helix mattress and it will give you many of the benefits of a of a Helix mattress. Uh this one is for like back and shoulder support. Looking forward to trying that. 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However, I have been able to keep other invertebrates in there. Uh I've had crayfish um keep in there for a long time. Um oh, I look I love how it looks at night cuz I I have a couple of underwater lights. Uh, and they they sort of project up out of the water at night, which is a cool effect. Anyway, um, so interesting thing. I know that what kills the snails is not the metals in the water column. It's the direct exposure to the metal. So, them suckling on the metal to get algae off the side. That's what kills them. I I am willing to bet you based on this uh sample of one study, I I'll grant you. Um, but anyway, if you look over here, this is my newest thing that I built. I call it my water table. This is sort of my latest iteration of a of a kind of a a shallow water or a wet table kind of thing to place to play like with have lots of different little experiments going, right? Like that's um what I do here. Um so anyway, um this water table is plumbed into the trough, right? So it's the same water. It's the same water across the same system with the same dissolved metals in it. And I have a million thriving mystery snails and other kinds of snails um in here. So that's why I say I think it's probably the direct exposure to the metal that that that uh kills the snails. But anyway, let me tell you about the the water table which um I built, I swear to God, in an afternoon and I am not particularly handy, right? Um it is just a wooden frame. Um it doesn't even have a floor. Um it's laying directly on the the bench there. I just have I have a cross piece in the middle to keep it from like bowing out from the pressure of the water. But other than that, it's just an empty wooden frame um into which I hammered pond liner um uh which is just it's watertight, cheap watertight uh material that you use to line artificial ponds and and make them watertight, right? So, I just like hammered it in there and then cut around the edges and that's it. That's all it is. And then at the end, um, because it's just hard for me to reach back there, uh, I just threw some aqua soil back there and some rotala. And so that'll grow. I mean, I did that like a month ago, and that's going to become just a big bushy bog um down at that end that I won't ever really have to really worry about. I'll just let it be wild, you know. Um, so this here is interesting. This is a piece of um, uh, trailing jade, which is like a a house plant. Um, that's a succulent and a clipping of it fell into the aquarium. Uh, and now it's growing underwater. It's showing new growth, which like shouldn't happen. Like there's there's not a lot of aquatic succulents there. You they're desert plants. Um, so that's that's weird. I I'll let you know what it does. Um, this is fun. This is like a moss culture that I I am doing where you just you just take moss and you blend it up in a blender. Um, I'm doing the same thing on these rocks over here. You just take mosses of various kinds. You blend them up in a blender and then you mix them with dirt um and water. You make a paste. It's like the Chia Petet method. You you you smear it onto, you know, a suitable substrate and uh you keep it wet and uh it'll grow. Um and that's that's like I did that like two weeks ago. That's like two weeks of of growth. Eventually that'll be a real thick green carpet of uh some moss that I just found out in the yard. Now look at how beautiful this tank is looking from above. This is my mangrove forest tank that I I have a build video for this um you know on my channel and I really have loved the direction that it has taken. It's it's it's kind of surprised me. So it has a surface environment as you can see which is just um I made it out of uh expanding foam. It's foam that I you know sprayed and then carved and then I uh sealed it with silicone and crusted it with sand. Um, and I've through trial and error found certain mosses that do really well on it and succulents. Look at those succulents. Like again, why desert plants do so well in a uh very wet environment, I really couldn't tell you. Wouldn't have I guess they're good at managing their water. Um, anyways, but look how awesome that looks. Um, and there's my crayfish. Um, kind of want to suck his head. the culinary people who are watching will get that joke. Um, but he's awesome. He was tiny when I got him. I I've overfed him. Okay, so look at this. This is an aquarium plant. I'm not quite sure what. I thought it was maka um until I uh planted it here immersed and it started blooming. It's it's um um just earlier today it actually turned purple. It's it's blooming purple. So, I don't know what it is, but uh it's very happy being grown on the surface there. Um, I've got dojo loaches. The they boy, they have gotten quite big. Um, I don't think they're going to get any bigger. Um, but I've got I have a pond outside and they're they're they're temperate um climate fish. They'd actually probably be happier in cold water than they are in the, you know, somewhat heated water here. So, um, the plant that I'm growing immersed coming out of it is paos, a common house plant. Commonly what aquarium people will do is buy buy it as buy the house plant, clean off the roots, get all the uh dirt off of it, and then you just put the roots straight into the water and it'll do a really good job of filtering your water for you. And um what I do with PAOS that has worked really well is I just um I take driftwood that I buy at the you know aquarium shops um and I just nail it to the walls of the greenhouse um and then I you know train the the vines up through the um through the driftwood which uh you know is really easy. It looks cool and it looks like thematic with aquariums right like so to me I I'm proud of myself. Uh it was a good idea. that I had. Um anyway, really really happy with how this tank is looking just exploding with green. Um and uh the the the mangroves the mangroves themselves are growing um very slowly but that is what they do. They are slow growing tree. This is a a long-term project. Okay, so next tank. I have never showed you this before. This is uh my newest baby, my pride and joy. I have taken to calling it my Augusta tank cuz it's uh without quite intending to I ended up making something that looked very golf courseish. Um but I I actually secretly love um the landscape architecture of golf courses. Um but again I remind you uh no CO2 man. Look at those crypts. Uh aquarium people will know how hard those are to grow and how slow they grow. Uh the dwarf hairrass there no CO2. Um, I think it's able to grow because it is there's just so much sun, you know, so much sun. Um, look at that. That blue beta is really thinking about like, could I eat that snail? No, I I probably couldn't. So, and that dude's going to feed me anyway. So, maybe if I was real desperate, I'd eat an eye off of that snail or something. That's what he's thinking. Anyways, uh, oh my god, I'm so happy with how this tank has turned out. It's so pretty. Um, but anyway, I uh I shot the the making of this tank all the way. Um, it's now a year old, so I've got like a year of footage uh showing you how a tank that you start um you know evolves. Um, and uh with a secret special guest. Um, I did the same tank, we did the same tank uh on the other side of the country indoors uh instead of out in a greenhouse with like the same plants, same uh same aquarium, same everything. Um, and you will be able to see how differently they turn out. Um, so that's a video that I'm going to do that I'll probably finish up uh, you know, midsummer, I think, when the t I really want the tanks to be really mature before we we finish shooting on that. But it it's more traditionally lit. Um, you know, you you don't need any artificial light when you keep aquariums in a greenhouse like um, to grow the plants. Um, the light that you do put on them is is purely decorative. And that's why I've mostly focused on using underwater lights in my other tanks. With this one, I wanted to use this uh standard above water light. Um just to have that kind of traditional look in one of my tanks that can't be replicated any other way. Um it's also, God, it's such a pleasure to film aquariums. They're so easy to film because they light themselves and they stay still and yet they move, right? They have movement to them. It's it's the easiest thing to film in the world. And as you can see, this is, you know, this is footage I shot really quickly. None of it is uh mechanically stabilized. It's not holding the camera against my body and leaning at awkward angles. Okay, this is my cube that I've shown you on the channel before. you. This is sort of my my most mature like aquacaped tank as as primitive escape as it is. Um I'm still really really happy with it and I love I've as a smaller Mexican crayfish there. Um those guys are so so beautiful and so much fun and um I've got a I've got a mating uh pair in there. Um I've seen I've seen carrying a clutch of eggs, but I've not seen any babies. But I've got um shrimp that breed in there and and a million snails, million bladder snails that I I I use to feed my u my puffer fish which are in the tall tank behind it, which the tall tank is I'm currently redoing. Um I I I have in my experience uh wide tanks are better, right? Surface area is really beneficial to an aquarium ecosystem. So I'm not surprised that um this has been a bit of a challenge in terms of you know competing with algae mostly. Um so I'm restarting with a simpler concept where um I' I just want valinaria uh just that um eel grass plant. Um I just want a forest of it that will grow to the top right. So a solid up and down column of uh valineria. Um and you can see like um you know I've got incredible um root growth uh already there. This is this is a recent project and look at all those runners. I love getting to see the root systems in cross-section. Uh and as you can see, I am running CO2. Um this is my first experiment with CO2. I just want to at least give it a head start. Um I don't love the idea of keeping pressurized gases in a greenhouse that gets super hot. But I'm going to keep an eye on it and just see how it does this summer. And then if it does well, I might use CO2 in my other tanks, which for non-quarium people, it's kind of like putting your tank on on steroids. Uh because that's the thing about aquatic plants that we forget is that they don't have really much access to their fundamental building block which is carbon, right? Um you know some some plants can get carbonates from the water. Um but you got to remember that plants evolved on land for land and they some of them basically came back to the water. Um they're sort of the the whales and the dolphins of uh of the plant world are aquatic plants like that. Um that is pearlweed in that bowl right there. No filter, no agitation, no algae whatsoever. It's crazy how easy it is to grow a bowl of pearlweed in some aqua soil. Like it's it's the perfect aquarium plant. It grows so aggressively. Um this is um asparagus fern. And some dude on Reddit said that it grows in the water and I was like I don't believe you. So, I stuck some in some water and I It's still alive. It's not doing well. I just I'll let you know how that goes. Anyway, so the cube there. Um yeah, so plants kind of aren't really made for the water, right? Like they so they've sort of they tolerate living in the water. Certain species do. Um and uh and so it can be surprisingly difficult to grow aquatic plants um without injecting CO2. You inject CO2 in and plants get unlimited moisture which they love and all of the, you know, the building blocks that they would normally need from terrestrial gases. Um, all that carbon is available to them in the water and uh and they grow like the Dickens. But as you can see, my my plants growing like the Dickens, most of them um in the greenhouse here with uh no CO2. And I think that's just down to um down to sun. They like of the sun. Hey, thanks for uh hanging out with me for a little bit here, checking out the uh the little midlife crisis project. Um you know, I thank you for caring. So few people care but I care. Uh, it's really been a good project for me for for uh keeping me together and uh thanks for being together with me. I'll show you some more of this later if you want. Or if this video bombs, I won't. Maybe I will.