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Forest Floor Ground Cover

Written by Ian MacMillan

Friday, 07 November 2003

The New Hampshire Forest Floor

If you look at the forest in winter time New England, you see that the trees are bare and their leaves are littered on the ground below. The forest ground here in New Hampshire is covered year round by the leaves of the maples, birch and oaks that dominate the area.

Since I have to currently cover 300 linear feet with forests that represent the area, I needed to find a cheap way to represent the leaf littered ground. Searches in the area shops and online did not result in finding anything that even closely represented the leaves. Then I picked up Basic Scenery for Model Railroaders by Lou Sassi. The book is great and I recommend that any model railroader pick it up, and plus its by Lou Sassi, an excellent modeler. Lou has a section in the book about forests and forests floors, and what did I find? An answer to my question! Lou had recommended using, what else, real leaves.

Here is the basic way that I made the leaf covered forest floors for my layout as recommended by Lou. First thing first, buy your own blender. Your spouse will give you an odd look when you do this, as did mine, but just tell them that you don't want to break theirs, and say nothing more. Also, do this while they are at work, that way questions on what you are doing to the kitchen will be avoided...Go out side an gather up a trash bag of leaves and bring them inside.</p>

You will also need the following items:
- T-Shirt
- Bowl or bucket
- Oven (Make sure it works)
- Cookie Sheet

My Blender

OK, get your blender, this one is mine...Place the leaves in the blender and then fill the blender up with water. Doesn't matter if the water is warm or cold. But make sure that you keep your hand on the top, some blenders don't come with tight covers anymore, as I found out. Then set you blender to puree at first, so not to burn out the motor. I found that after setting the blender on puree for about 5 min, a 3 min spurt of chop got the leaves nice and fine. Now, take an old T-shirt and put it over a bucket or bowl. I didn't have a bucket so I had to go the bowl route. Lou recommends using a rubber band to keep the T-shirt on the bucket when you pour the leaf much on. Once again, I didn't have that also, shoulda come better prepared. Take the pitcher from the blender and pour your mix onto the T-shirt. Let this set for a few seconds. There will still be water in the shirt, but pull it up, forming a pouch, and begin to ring the water out of the shirt, into the bowl.

Figure 1

Once you have got all the water out, put what is left in the T-shirt on a cookie sheet as shown in Figure 1. Now, spread the leaves much out as evenly as possible. This doesn't look like much now, but it will once it dries out. Now, on your first try you will not get as much as is shown on my cookie sheet below, what is shown is 3 pitchers of blended leaves, and about 45 min of work. No one said this was going to be a fast way, but it is free! Except for you getting your own blender. Now you can place the cookie sheet in your oven set at 200 degrees, leaving the door ajar, or if your oven is broken, like mine was, you can set the cookie sheet outside in the sun. This takes longer so I just made a bunch of cookie sheets up, put them on the porch in the sun, and then did something else for the day.

Once they have dried, get two sieves, one fine and one med. Take your leaves from the cookie sheet and run them through the med sieve into a bucket. Place what you have in the sieve into another bucket. Now take what went through the med sieve, and send it through the fine one into another bucket. There, you now have 3 grades of chopped leaves! Now all you have to do is place them on your layout like you would with any other ground covering.

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