Busch cornfield

I bought the Busch cornfield catalog item HO 1202 for my farm.

The box contains 10 pairs of green 2 dimensional corn rows each 5mm wide and 10cm long giving 10cm² of corn, plus a small bag of flocking.



The instructions suggest:
1) painting the cobs on the corn stalks yellow
2) gluing flocking to the tips of the stalks
3) twisting the stalks so that they are no longer 2 dimensional (using tweezers)
4) gluing sand over the bases

I have never seen yellow corn cobs growing so I decided  to paint them green as in real life instead. I painted the base of the stalks brown.

I then glued the provided flocking onto the tips. (It is a nice tan color not white as the picture below suggests.)

I tried gluing a very fine sand on one base but it looked like the corn was growing out of crushed stone so I pulled that off and painted all the bases a dark brown. I added a seconds coat after taking the picture above so that none of the green plastic was showing through. There is insufficient space between the rows to cover the bases of the rows after installing each row.

Using tweezers I bent the stalks and leaves out of their 2D plane to make them 3d.

I then glued some of the corn onto a sheet of paper

And mounted the rectangular corn patch in a field on the layout.

The edges of the field needed to be blended into the ground so I added some plaster and ran a tractor through it to make some tire tracks..

Once dry, the new plaster was painted the same color as the bases and blended into the surrounding grass.

Suggestions
If you want a cornfield I highly recommend this kit but I make the following suggestions:

• Be aware that it takes a lot of careful work under a magnifier.
• Do not paint the cobs yellow as they suggest, rather paint them a green slightly brighter than the stalks.
• Paint the base of each plant a light tan
• Paint the bases before adding the flocking
• Twist each stem a few time along its length to move each plant from 2D to 3D
• Glue the rows onto paper or card before installing on the layout
• Take care to keep the rows separate, they grab hold of each other like Velcro®
• If you manage to break any leaves off, keep them and glue them to the base as fallen leaves.
• Don't buy too many kits. A single 10cm² kit took me at least 12 hours to prepare.