The Gel Is Still There in Year Two and the Tree Is Dead
When the gel is still in the pit, the fault is placement, contact, drainage or salt. A five-step post-mortem separating a planting error from a product claim.
Sand Backfill Over Clay: The Perched Water Table You Built Yourself
A sand layer in a clay pit perches water and suffocates roots; gel at the interface seals it further. Four drainage details and a five-minute percolation test.
Re-Liquefied by Monday: A Post-Mortem on Three Weekend Gel Failures
Monday, 7.15 a.m. The domestic supervisor opens the bin store and finds three 5 litre containers sitting in a shallow pool. Each was dosed on Friday afternoon, each passed a tilt test before it left the ward, and each is now roughly 70 per cent liquid with a rubbery disc of gel floating on top. The …
Timer Fault, Flooded Floor: Recovering a Waterlogged Vivarium After a Misting Runaway
The failure was ordinary: a cheap mechanical misting timer jammed on, and the nozzles ran for nine hours overnight onto a 60 cm dart frog vivarium. By morning the drainage layer had overflowed, the substrate was soupy, a pothos had pulled loose, and two of my three frogs sat on the cork wall above a…
The Floor Sank in Six Weeks: A Post-Mortem on a Collapsed Polymer Layer
Six weeks after building my largest vivarium, a 90 cm paludarium-style dart frog tank, the front of the floor visibly dropped by nearly 3 cm. The plants leaned, the cork background gaped at the top, and pressing a finger into the substrate revealed a mushy band over a hard, water-logged slab. The po…
