Dirt

After painting the "ground" brown, I realized that I was sort of in the mood to do some landscaping.  One of my goals for the layout is to use real dirt as a ground cover.  I took an old cookie sheet out to the garden, filled it with dirt, then popped it into the oven.  After baking for about an hour at 425 degrees, the dirt was nice and dry, easily crumbled.  Using a large strainer, I sifted out the larger bits, leaving me with a fine, dry mix of real dirt.

The next step was to cover my first hill with spray adhesive (ordinary 3M spray glue), over which I sprinkled a thin layer of my sifted dirt mixture.

On all of my previous layouts, I've used Woodland Scenics ground foams for virtually everything - trees, ground cover, you name it.  I'm not sure I want to do that on this layout.  To help me decide, I'm going to do one half of this hill with ground foam, with a couple of my twisted-wire & ground foam trees.  The other half I'll cover with "real" materials - ground up leaves, twigs, and other "stuff" collected from outside, and upside-down plant roots for trees (following a technique described here: http://www.trainboard.com/grapevine/showthread.php?p=773927).

Here's the half done with ground foam:

Tomorrow I'll do the other half with materials from outside, and decide from there which method I'll use for the rest of the layout.