Jim Rowson said:
I want to be clear that Nancy made the cover, and just used me to illustrate it.
And my family will no doubt abuse me more
Abuse is overrated !
Outstanding Jim and congratulations!
Ditto!
Jim, youāve achieved Railway Rock Star status!! Congratulations.
Wow Jim a true recognition of a real modeler, Beautiful Layout under recognition by us modelers,
THANKS for all your hard work, for us to enjoy
Dennis
Wow, what excitement, I remember when I got a couple of one page projects published and getting a email from Rene and then the magazine came, just wow, cover and everything. Congratulations you certainly deserve it, Bill. Now I can say, āI know that guyā
Had an interesting visitor in the Jasper forest area today: a praying mantis!
About the (scale) size of a Shetland pony. If it sticks around and keeps growing we might have a remake of Them! [link].
Jim;
I remember seeing a cartoon once (possibly The Far Side). Two preying mantis males are sitting at a bar. A female preying mantis is getting ready to bite the one maleās head off. The other male says, āDude!! I think she likes you!ā Dark humor, but still kind of funny.
Best, David Meashey
Not the far side, but good enough!
Thatās a pretty rare to see a Praying Mantis, thanks for the photos.
Here is the one we displayed at all our train meets and was on the back of your shirts back in the 80s
Nancy Norris came by today for a pruning/teaching session. It seems I have not been watering my desert enough. My bad! Also: Nancy has suffered through Covid-19 but has pretty much recovered (some lingering weird side effects). Whew! She recommends strongly against having it.
Hereās some photos of the desert town of Durango after Nancy has given it a good makeover:
Cheers!
Looks good!
Succulents are weird. I find, like the old hymn, they āblossom and flourish, like leaves on the tree, then whither and perishā just to irk me! Same species, same soil, same conditions, and one fires, one drowns, and one does fine. Sedum? Forget about it. Weāve had some cover our āmountainsā only to sizzle away, then reappear in little nooks elsewhere. Anyway, I thank you for sharing your experiences! It helps us move from ātrial and errorā to deliberate planting!
Eric
I need to write down some of the stuff that Nancy told me so I donāt forget:
- need to be more aggressive at taming (i.e. cutting back) some of the ground cover that was encroaching on neighboring plants
- the conifers need to be trimmed once a year, in November.
- the lemon cypress will need to be trimmed back to about 1 foot less than our target height, picking a new āapexā for the tree and then pruning them to let the trunk show as we did before we planted them in the first place
- the dwarf alberta spruce didnāt grow as much as the lemon cypress. most of the pruning will be to just trim out some of the growth to show the trunk as we did before planting
- the japanese maples need to be pruned in January when they are dormant. we can use our hands to strip the leaves off the branches if we want earlier, but they should drop all their leaves relatively easily. Nancy did cut back the maple near the (future) sawmill, but the other maples are going to wait. if we start pruning now it will just stimulate growth. waiting for when they are dormant will be better for the plant
- currently we are watering 15 minutes, twice a week. Iāve been watering the durango succulents every 2 weeks and thatās clearly not enough. going to a good soak once a week and weāll see how that works
- there are surprisingly few weeds. yay! not by accident: lots of rock and fine fill, ground cover is crowding out the weeds. when weeds show up, drenching them with vinegar kills them pretty handily without causing any evil effects (well, if you inject vinegar, it probably isnāt so great). also, I was reasonably diligent early on at picking weeds while the ground cover was getting established, so that was a good (not completely on purpose) thing to have done
- some of the ground cover has dead stuff underneath. need to cut that out, as it ends up being attractive to snails and other pests. some of the ground cover that has little flowers had grown in too far and covered our nice dry wash, and it was looking shabby (some dead stuff), so Nancy cut that back āhardā (as she said). this is in the Jasper forest near the mine: Sweet Alyssum and Lobelia
I hope I captured it all. Iāll add more if it occurs to me.
[edited to add the last ground cover bullet]
Hereās a set of before (November 2019) and after (October 2020) pictures to give you a feel for how much has changed in the last yearā¦
Durango before:
Durango after:
And Jasper before:
Jasper after:
Spring has sprung on the Durango & Jasper and the plants are going crazy. There are a couple of trees that I think are cool (actually there are more but these are looking particularly cool right now).
This first one is a corokia cotoneaster, also known as a āLittle Princeā and is showing little yellow flowers right now:
And this is a Japanese maple (sorry, I canāt get more specific. there are several Japanese maples on the layout and they are wildly different from each other). Nancy and I agreed to try to do a form of classic bonsai pruning. The idea is to make it look windblown (toward the left in this photo). We started by pruning away branches that were going in the wrong direction and also pruning some of the lower branches to give it a more pronounced trunk. Later weāll use wire and weights to accentuate the shapes of the branches to emphasize the windswept look.
Happy spring!
[edited to fix a typo]
Looks awesome Jim! Nancy did a great job bringing it to life!
I just love this pic