Ideas For A Bougie Indoor and Outdoor Tortoise Enclosure and Tortoise Care Cheat-Sheet

Time to read 6 minutes

Meet Lenny. He is our Hermanns Mediterranean Tortoise. In this article, I will outline how I created my indoor and outdoor tables and enclosure for me tortoise plus the details of necessities and enrichment I provide.

Indoor or Outdoor Tortoise Enclosure?

It is a good idea to provide both an outdoor enclosure and a table or indoor enclosure for Mediterranean and Russian tortoises for when it is too cold for your tortoise to be outside for most of the day or they are coming out of hibernation as the weather warms up.

Please see here for updates on Lenny’s enclosure for Spring 2023

Indoor Tortoise Table for Winter

This is where Lenny lives in the colder months when she is not hibernating.

This is a tortoise table bought from a maker on Etsy. (unfortunately, the store is currently taking a break.)

I painted it white, lined the bottom with plastic sheeting and stuck on some decorative tile stickers on the sides to both protect the wood and add some visual interest.

Tortoise Substrate for Indoor Table

I use coco coir brick expanded in warm water to form a soil-like consistency. You can use topsoil as well. No other kind of substrate is recommended.

Coco coir and topsoil contain similar micronutrients found in the composition of earth. They are natural materials. Other peat-based growing medium like potting composts are not recommended as they contain added fertilisers suitable for plants and can cause problems for tortoises.

Tortoises like to bury down into the substrate to thermo-regulate, which they can not do with pet shop pellets or any other brands labelled “Tortoise terrain”. Stick to basic Topsoil or coir bricks.

Enrichment

Tortoises do not need toys like say, a dog or cat. However, it is important to provide rocks, logs and hides within the tortoise’s space to enable climbing, which they love to do. If you have a young tortoise, it is especially important to provide rocks: young’uns are prone to slipping onto their backs when climbing and have difficulty getting back up. Providing rocks enables them to use this as leverage to push against and right themselves again.

Food

For details on what I feed my Mediterranean tortoise, see my guide here. But to ensure your tortoise’s beak stays trim, serve food on a slate tile or flat rock.

Water

Naturally, always ensure your tortoise has access to clean water. I use a shallow terracotta dish a little bigger than Lenny and sink it a little into the substrate so she can easily get in and out. Tortoises like to soak themselves in their water in order to hydrate so provide a dish big enough for them to do so. For safety, I also keep a couple of big stones in the water just in case Lenny loses her footing in the water, she will have something to push against to get out.

Humidity

I give the substrate (and Lenny’s shell) a light mist of water each morning to increase humidy. Because of the lights, I find the substrate quickly dries out on the upper surface.

I also mist her because I feel like added moisure on the shell and good hydration will help to prevent pyramiding. (Not sure about the veracity of this statement but Lenny has a smooth hard shell with 0 pyramiding so maybe something to try.)

Lights for Tortoise Enclosure

Whether indoors or out, tortoises need UVA and UVB in order to metabolize calcium for their bones and shell so very important for their care.

I use:

• Essential tortoise indoor kit: Basking Spot lamp Arcadia D3 UVB buy here.
• Arcadia reflector lamp holder with clamp and safety grill here ( I use the 20cm diameter)
• Arcadia Pro T5 UVB strip light with difuser: here.

Arcadia are a leading and trusted brand for reptile lighting. For your reptile set up that involves any electrics, I personally wouldn’t trust any other brand or try to cheap out on this area because when these products fail, it could have devastating consequences.

NB: Affiliate. These are links specific to the specific equipment that I purchased myself and trust because I have been using them for years. I am using Amazon Affiliate links to recommend these products, if you are in the market for one.

If you use my links to purchase these item, or any item linked to from my page, I receive a small commission, at no cost to you. Thank you

I opted for a table with a mesh lid to protect her from our other curious creatures.

Outdoor Tortoise Enclosure

And here is where Lenny lives in the warmer months. this is a 280cm x 120cm enclosure made by a local carpenter from my design. I have access to each section from the lifting hatches.

Inside also contains a small greenhouse I picked up here which I painted, where she has access to an Arcadia D3 basking lamp and a greenhouse tubular heater both connected to our home Hive system so that we can set to timers and/or control from our Hive App on our phones.

The Beginnings

This area used to be a flower bed, but when we moved into the house, this area was pretty overgrown with weeds. So I thought to try to kill the weeds and seeds, I decided to line this area with layers and layers of some of the cardboard we had lying around after our move.

Then over a period of a couple of weeks, I would soak the cardboard, and layer some more and then finally topped with a thick layer of top soil for digging down into in order for Lenny to be able to thermo regulate, like we would snuggle down into a duvet in winter. This was done about two years ago.

Planned Enclosure Updates and Improvements

This method of preparing the ground worked relatively well, however, as we moved in in Summer, we could only kill or weed what was showing…laying cardboard in Summer is all well and good but does little to curb and of the Spring and Autumnal bulbs that were in the soil that had been planted by the previous owner because by the time Spring rolls around, that cardboard had composted down and effectively conditioned the soil.

So! After a couple of years of observing this area, a job for this Spring is to remove Lenny’s enclosure and to remove the bulbs, weed the area and line the bottom with rodent proof mesh. The reason being is that I’ve realised that the enclosure could attract rodents.

The enclosure is pretty secure but lining the bottom with mesh, as it is all around, will just let me rest easy that Lenny is protected on all sides. I have heard some heartbreaking stories of tortoises being eaten by rats and other animals!

Please see here for updates on Lenny’s enclosure for Spring 2023

Putting it all together

I decided that the warm area of the enclosure – the greenhouse, would be painted blue and I would them the whole enclosure in a kind of Mediterranean casita style, since she is a Mediterranean tortoise.

Creating a door for Lenny’s greenhouse

One of my favourite jobs was figuring out how Lenny was going to navigate around the enclosure.

I decided to but a little hole in one of the walls of the mini greenhouse and staple a bit of craft felt onto it to create a flap in a bit of an attempt to be able to keep some of the heat inside the greenhouse. It’s very amusing in the mornings because if you time it well enough, Lenny tends to like to make these big entrances that says “I’m Here!” when she Leaves the greenhouse to chill out in her garden for the day.

So we still have some work to do to upgrade Lenny’s living spaces but taking care of animals is a long commitment where we are always learning and improving.

Tortoises make amazing pets, but they do require lots of research and initial out lay but honestly, get the basics like food and shelter correct, and they are pretty low maintenance on a daily basis compared to say, our cats and dog.

Look out for my post on what I grow and forage for my tortoise to eat!

• Animal Husbandry
• Cooking
• DIY
• Gardening
• Homemade Personal Care
• Knitting
• Knitting Vlogs
• Uncategorized