Shed Wars: A simple little Orchard

Following BLAM last month I promised myself that I would take a break from building and painting for at least four weeks. I so nearly did it but the craving to construct something new and slap some paint on it was just too strong.

This enforced absence was cut short when a large parcel from China arrived on my doorstep. What could this be? Id completely forgotten that I had bought several flocked trees from china. Indeed over 60 of them retailing in at a total cost of around £35. Most of mine are at the larger end of size 12cm+

Link to ebay seller: http://stores.ebay.co.uk/Ethersell88/Model-Tree-/_i.html?_fsub=2633720015&_sid=794874525&_trksid=p4634.c0.m322

I’d bought tall poplars, oaks, willows and other deciduous varieties. I also bought some fruit trees.

And it’s the last lot I am going to start with first for my Orchard.

A couple of years back I bought some resin stone walls including corner sections. Apologies I can’t remember the vendor but these were painted up black and dry brushed greys. It was then a simple job of laying these out on a piece of ply I had knocking around to form the perimeter of the orchard. These were fixed to the base using a new purchase – a hot glue gun.

The glue set immediately so I could start on the next stage putting down the basing material. In this case a mix of builders sand and railway model ballast. This was glued to the base surface using PVA. Once dry after a couple of hours the base was painted dark brown and then highlighted.

Over the last few weeks I have been buying off ebay several bags of static grass and flock. I have now got a stock that will last me a life time. Seriously folks there is so much cheap stuff being knocked out on the ebay site I don’t think I have paid full price for any foliage or basing terrain stuff in the past two years. A suitable mix of these was then glued to the painted base and left to dry.

Once all this was dry I could turn my attention to the trees. Orchard’s are typically laid out in a grid pattern and mine would be no different. With 10 trees purchased I decided on two rows of four thereby giving loads of room around the edges and a couple spare. These were fixed to the board by drilling holes in the baseboard and then the trees fixed in these holes using both superglue and the hot glue gun.

A word of caution the flock on some of these chinese sourced trees is lose so a good spray of either wet scenic cement of cheap hairspray will help to keep them happy. The stuff that had fallen off in the bag I used as additional scatter around the base of the trees to signify fallen leaves and fruit.