PHOTOS BY THE AUTHOR
Mary Cay’s Christmas gondola
Building a Holiday planter for the garden/Wayne WesolowskI T
he Sonoran desert can be very beautiful and very barren at the same time. Our home in Tucson
has Arizona landscaping, which means a lot of rock, gravel, dirt and cactus. However, the area around my work- shop had a similar atmosphere, but es- pecially bleak. On an NMRA layout tour we visited
friend Ron Kuykendal’s model railroad. At the entrance to his layout building Ron had made a simple wooden box gondola car for flowers. With a pulley for a brake wheel and a few metal de- tails, it captured all the elements of a retired railroad car. My wife, Mary Cay, immediately
loved it, so I took a few pictures for fu- ture reference. Later, after looking at the bare area by my shop door, I decid- ed some flowers or a little decoration would really help brighten it up. It was time we made our own gondola planter. Mary Cay now keeps an array of flow- ers in the gondola, and she changes the plants with the seasons. At Christmas the gon is filled with presents and strung with mini-lantern lights.
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The Christmas gon (top) is filled with presents and is ready to greet visitors. The carbody is made from scrap lumber and the brake wheel is a pulley from a washing machine. To begin building (above) the frame was assembled from 2″×4″’s and drywall screws.
To start the project I used salvaged redwood from a deck project from my friend Bob Dirksen. There are ugly ter- mites here that, along with the sun,
will quickly destroy any wooden struc- ture not protected against the in- vaders. I built the gon up off the ground with a plastic liner to keep the dirt-
DECEMBER 2011
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