1. Christmas Tree. In a perfect world all your garden plants would be real plants, but while you wait for your ground cover to spread and save for real bonsai trees you need to find something to fill the empty spaces. Michaels Art Store sells little fir trees around Christmas. With a starting price of $8-16 each they are too expensive to buy in the beginning of December, but come January the price drops 75% to $2-4 each. Planning on buying bulk I discovered at a Dollar Store that sold them for $1-2 each. I bought all of them and was able to create I nice evergreen forest.
2-4. Aquarium Plants. What could be better than plants designed to be underwater to put outside. The colour on many aquarium plants can be too bright to look natural outside and the price per plant can be quite high. Since home aquariums have been around for a long time, finding used and faded plants in second hand stores and garage sales are common. Since our forest areas are a dark green, I placed these plants by the waters edge where they look at home.
5. Bonsai Tree. My parents had this bonsai tree when I was a child in the 1970s. It never looked quite right on their coffee table. It is fragile plastic so stepping on it is a bad idea. In a world where it is hard to have plants with an interesting trunk the bonsai is a welcome addition.
6-8. Worn Plastic tree. Leaving a plastic tree outside for over a year in the blazing sun and freezing cold can really take a toll. Melting, cracking, breaking and fading are all possibilities of how the plants will react to being outside. Considering a real miniature tree can be purchased for $5 you shouldn't pay much more for a fake one. We used the plastic trees as place holders to one day be able to cultivate a real beautiful tree. This first tree is near the end of it's tour in the layout and soon will be retired.
9 Topiary. There are so many different artificial plants made of different types of plastics, woods and other materials. These topiaries have wooden trunks and we did not think they would do very well outside considering if stepped on it would splinter. To our surprise they are still with us lining the brewery parking lot.
10. Dollar Bush Ball. I don't understand why interior decorators thought that plastic bush balls in big glass vases make great center pieces. I would rather see a chocolate cake in the center of my table. (GRIN) We found use for these oddities by digging a hole and burying half of it. For a $1 a bush, you cannot go wrong.
11. Dollar Grass. One square foot of plastic grass for a dollar. When we saw this at a local Dollar Store we were very excited picturing the residential community covered in beautiful short grass that would never have to be trimmed. We purchased a couple dozen of these plastic mats and trimmed them to fit around the little driveways and houses. There was only one thing we did not think about: The weeds. It was impossible to pull out the weeds without lifting the green squares. The bushy green sprouts soon came apart in some sections and we were only left with the structural grid on the mats. They soon became ugly, impracticable and we had to rip them all out and throw them away.
12-14. Glass Trees and plastic flowers. Usually found in Thirft Stores, these are a quick way to add colour a layout year round. If you want happy flowers in your layout in the dead of winter these are the plants for you. Some of them did not stand up too well over the past year and we decided to retire them
(BLOG ENTRY BY BOB)
The continuing fight against the weeds - Ground Cover
For the past couple of blogs, I have talked about getting rid of weeds, but what about the plants we are trying to keep? The Ground cover is the end product of what you want the layout to grow. It is the grass and the bushes that add detail to your scenery to choke out and minimize unwanted weeds. If I knew the latin name for the plants that would be fantastic or even if I kept the plastic tags that came with each plant giving me the common name that would be even better. But yesterday was recycling day and we threw all the containers away. Besides, I have many different books and magazine articles on miniature plants, but if you live somewhere different than the place where the article was written (New Zealand, Switzerland or even Alaska) you may not be able to buy the plants mentioned, and even if you could they may not survive due to the temperature or intensity of sunlight. Our layout gets a lot of sun and we aren't the greatest at making sure everything is watered even during a heat-wave so hardy plants are very important to find.
1. Natural Moss: We pulled this from our lawn. It is dry, flaky and has no visible roots. It grows anywhere and can be found in the forest around here in Canada.
2. Scotch Moss: This looks the same as Irish moss but is strong enough to with stand a heat-wave. We had invested in lots of Irish moss last year and killed most of it off (What is left is not pretty enough to take a picture of) Currently we have planted it in the front and back yards of our residential area to hopefully have beautiful lawns for next year.
3. Wild Thyme: We had purchased herb Thyme seeds from the hardware store a couple of years ago. After the plants came and went their seeds produced something completely different. Mutant Thyme that grows to be a couple of feet tall and spreads like crazy. Out of control plants is normally very bad to have on a layout but with occasional trimming resembles brush trees. (plus the weeds hate this plant and it smells nice when you cut it)
4. Elfin Thyme: This is stuff you want to find. It is cute and green and spreads nicely. The only problem is at $3 for 4 square inches and having a layout that might be 40ft x 30ft it would take thousands of dollars to cover the whole layout in one year. But like I said it spreads nicely so we buy a dozen of them every year and have to be patience and find other plants to fill the gaps until we have a beautiful green carpet.
5. Wooley Thyme: This is the strongest of the Thymes we have purchases. It survives all that the weather throws at it and it spreads exceedingly well. The purple flowers and fuzzy texture provide interesting accents to the countryside.
6. Lemon Thyme & 7. White Thyme: Another variation that smell nice, looks great and fills space nicely.
8 Mini Fern: This is the most interesting of our recent purchases. I wish I knew what it was actually called. Very detailed, looks fantastic, hopefully it will do well for us. I planted it behind our brewery and beside the track sidings. Have to wait until next summer to see how it thrives.
9 - 12: Once again I don't know what these plants are named. They are all new purchases that looked great at the nursery but we will have to wait to see how they spread and if they survive.
Stay tuned for Part 2 :)
(blog entry by Bob)
Much like our railway bedding, the construction of our roads has been pea-gravel on top of landscape fabric. In order to get nice photos, like ones we've posted in "When Zombies Attack - 07-08-12" and "Tanker Truck Fire in G-Scale Land - 08-19-12", we had to spend over half an hour pulling weeds from the roads.
Though the gravel roads were a great place to start, I have been continuously looking for a way to replace them with something better. On yet another trip to Home Depot (I wish they sponsored our train layout, considering how many of their products
we purchase) I found rubber walkway tiles. Though they looked very much like asphalt, they also had a bevelled edge which prevents them from abutting nicely together. The table-saw provided quick, straight cuts but the rubber melted to the saw blade under all the friction. I tried tree-shears as well but it was slow work and the cuts were jagged. Scissors and knifes didn't work either. A hand-held jigsaw proved to be the best tool for trimming the tiles.
On the layout, I had to remove a 1/2 inch of gravel, rip out the
landscape fabric and re-lay the electrical wires to the buildings.
Even though there is some fine grading that needs to be done to
eliminate the joint spacing, I don't think the weeds stand a chance to grow through the new roads. I still have to do the line painting to indicate lanes, stop bars and parking spaces.
I performed a paint test on a spare piece of rubber trying: spray paint, liquid paper, acrylic paint and automobile striping. The advantage of having the road in 16" squares is that I can take individual tiles into the house to paint instead of laying on my belly outside in the dirt.
