The ground cover discussion has come up many, many times in my travels. "How do I make ground foam?" is usually the question asked in many forums and club meetings. Foam, being the obvious mistake in the question itself. I have found many messy attempts at making this necessity of model railroading. We recreated a way the old-schoolers did it (or so I have been told) and bring it to you free, because that's what we do. All in as little as three easy steps.

Being a carpenter (for life), makes me biased towards the materials I use, as they have served me well and I know exactly what I can expect. When the results of the ground cover experiment were recorded, we were amazed, to say the least. We tried a few different variations and found we could not screw it up. Obviously, adding too much of one ingredient would mess things up, but if you have more materials that isn't a problem, as you can just fix it very easily.

To start, I used the pine, spruce and fir sawdust that gets collected in my chop saw. In hind site, I will suggest my preference is, as with most projects, white pine, because of its fluffy nature and the fact it dries a yellow color.

First job is to mix your colors. Since the whole process requires water to dry out of the dust, we used water-based acrylic paints. Our first batch, and we recommend yours as well, was light green. We used Reeves Acrylic color for this. As long as the green has a yellow as opposed to blueish look, you'll be fine. If you don't know what I mean, close your eyes and think aqua.

Fill up 1/3 of a glass jar with water and put the equivalent of a 1" squeeze from the paint tube in it. Next, mix the two thoroughly. We used our trusty dry brush for this, as it has a flat end.

Fill 1/4 of the coffee can (or equivalent) with sawdust and dump the water in. Now here is the science, it's all about patience, friend, as this will look like it isn't enough paint at first. Get your hand in there and mix, squeeze and scrape the sides. Soon you will see most of the dust will get the color. If there is definitely not enough color, then just add water.

Let sit in a warm spot without a lid and let dry. This should take a few days. Fluff it up every so often and break up the balls. When completely dry, put it in an old container and make another color.

We made a multitude of colors, including all the fall colors we could think of - light to dark green and yellow to orange, and everything in between. In all we have 10 colours that we intend to use, exactly where we need it, just for the price of paint. That's a deal I can handle.