Added more trees at Ruston

Nothing special to report, just added a few more trees at Ruston. 

Played around with the new camera phone.

Super Tree conservation

Even in a hobby, conservation serves an important role. 

So after working on a batch of Super Trees, do you find yourself with a pile of smaller pieces that are almost too small to make use of but you hate to see go to waste?

Well after pruning my last batch I wound up with a decent pile of small bits and pieces.  First thought was to gather them up and crush them into a useful byproduct for ground cover.   After getting them into that pile, I got an idea!

Why not spray the pile with an adhesive so they hold that shape and then cover them with ground foam?  I think they'd look like thickets?  At least that is pretty much what I've determined Woodland Scenics Briar Patches are made from? 

So I grabbed some hair spray and gave them a heavy coat, and just like hair, it held its shape. 

Then I sprayed them with a coat of Krylon Dark Camo Brown and let it dry.  This increased the hold of the shape.

Next I sprayed a coat of Spray Adhesive and sprinkled on several shades of fine green ground foam and sealed it again with a liberal coat of hair spray and Viola!  Instant thickets!

Who knows, I may not be the first one to do this, but I like it!  Cheap thickets, almost zero waste of the Super Trees and you get a nice looking byproduct.  You can leave it in one big mass as I did, or it can be cut or torn into smaller pieces.

On this day, let us not forget the more than 2,300 U.S. servicemen who lost their lives at Pearl Harbor 83 years ago.

December 7th, 1941

Fuller tree lines

I made more of the thickets and briars and added them to the tree line.

Super Trees are awesome but the only slight drawback to them are the trunks. Even in N scale they can look spindly and malnourished. What I've done in the past is to build up different types of vegetation to help hide the trunks. Which in the wild, rural areas is not uncommon. A stand of trees in the rural areas are not manicured to the extent as they are in urban areas, so the underbrush grows untouched and fills in the tree line. Thus resulting in what looks like a solid mass of trees.

In this wider shot you can see about 4 or 5 different types of undergrowth: The home made thickets, Woodland Scenics clump foliage, several of the bushes with and without the white flowers, bits and pieces of broken off Super Trees that I flocked. Then on top of the static grass, I threw down several colors of course ground foam, followed by several colors of fine ground foam.