So I thought I would add Farmer to the list of all the things a model railroader has to be in the pursuit of creating a railroad empire.
Seafoam is an excellent product for making model trees. There are many good tutorials on the subject on YouTube and elsewhere.
To buy Seafoam is an expensive proposition and while I will happily pay for something someone else provides, Seafoam was not going to be one of them. I do have my limits.
I managed to find a company in Montreal that sold Seafoam seeds and ordered them.
I set about building a planter for my crop of what are essentially weeds with some old landscape beams off the pile, some vapour barrier and compost.
After reading and watching YouTube videos on the subject. I learned that if you’re lucky you can sow the seeds right into the ground and they will grow, especially at the Latitude I am at. After a month or so the crop was disappointing to say the least. On to the second attempt. I sowed the seeds into a foil cake pan, put it in the kitchen window and a bumper crop has appeared after five days.
Let me ask a basic question.
Are Seafoam Tree and SuperTree different?
Seafoam Tree is a type of tumbleweed (Teloxys Aristata: Wikipedia) native to the Gobi Desert, which I believe was released in Europe (the Netherlands?) around 2008 and introduced to North America after 2010.
On the other hand, SuperTree was sold by Scenic Express in 1997, and is my understanding that it is dried sagebrush (a type of mugwort?) harvested in Scandinavia.
Scenic Express SuperTrees are made from a natural, brush-like plant material, primarily a Scandinavian plant called seafoam, which is also a distant relative of North American sagebrush. These trees are used in model railroad scenery and dioramas, and they can be shaped and customized to represent various tree species. Scenic Express sells them under the name SuperTrees.
Scenic Express will not say what the plant is when asked.
A noticeable amount of growth in one day. I hear if you talk or sing to your plants they like it! Time to grab the twelve string and do my best “Canadian Railroad Trilogy”. If the plants are dead by morning we’ll know why.
Do that here for us, so I can sing along! We learned the whole song by heart in the Elisabeth Morrow School’s music class in the '60s (where they had no idea what ‘navvies’ in that pre-Internet age were…)
You are not the first one to ask from the U.S. TF. It is an offence to mail Teloxys Aristata (Seafoam) into the U.S. I have already checked.
Apparently I will get gazillions of seeds once these are ready to harvest, so I will gladly mail them to where it is legal to do so.
I got turned around at the border once because my truck was too dirty. I had been up the mountain getting my Christmas tree and she was showing a little dirt and a few needles in the box.
It was an agricultural refusal. I went home hit the truck with the hose and was back at the border a half hour later. They pulled me over again and then said okay it is clean enough.
To legally mail Teloxys aristata (commonly known as seafoam trees or sea foam) from Canada to the U.S., you’ll need to obtain the necessary permits and certifications from the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) and potentially the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS). These plants may require phytosanitary inspection and certification.
That’s a shipper in Italy, and they carefully guaranty nothing about actual delivery to the United States. You might luck out if they lie to Customs about what’s in the package.
Didn’t the Canadian dollars in the listing price til you off?
Thats certainly understandable. I’m still really curious to see how these tree’s take shape here. Thanks 