Some Landscaping

The dairy is waiting on coping stones to be painted. This involves getting the airbrush out and tomorrow could be a good day for it.

In the meantime, the gap between the dairy and the station needs to be looked at.

A small piece of polystyrene foam was cut and shaped to fit. It is a bit lower than the station platform but I thought that a small bush would be able to hide the gap. The jacaranda tree was purchased at the Forestville exhibition at the start of March. It is meant to be O scale but seeing some of the huge jacarandas about, I didn't think that it would be out of place. 

The foam is covering a 2 cm gap between the edge on the baseboard and the wall which you can see beyond the foam. The jacaranda helps to balance the foam so that it stays on the baseboard.

What to do with the gap beyond the foam? Fence it off with some Walthers fencing. I bought some when building Billabong Marina and have some left over.

The foam was painted burnt umber. I had some old Chromacryl paint and I have had it for years. When I gave the tube a bit of a squeeze to find out how much was still in the tube, the tube cracked. Now I have a brown stain on my floor. Fortunately I had a newer tube which I used.

When this dried, I broke out my Mod Podge and scatter material. I gave it a good coating of Mod Podge, which after a couple of years, is getting gluggy. I then sprinkled on some dyed sawdust, stuck on some lichen and some larger foam scatter material.

I used some sawdust and dirt from my chainsaw for the leaf litter under the tree.

I figured that it would need something else. Something to stop plastic people from straying onto the tracks. I needed another fence. I had some four rail fence but it didn't have enough post to stick it into the foam. I cut the bottom rail off but even towards the bottom of the slope this was causing problems. I have hidden the gap between the bottom of the post and the foam with some ground cover.

The end result looks like this.

There is still plywood visible below it as the foam was removed and worked on somewhere else. I am hoping as some stage to add a back scene so I need things to be removable for when this happens. Where foam was worked on ended up looking like this.

Not bad for an evening's work.

Until next time.