Autumn trees Part 1 (for Flames of War FOW 15mm)

As I'm working towards an autumn themed battlefield I asked for some model trees for Christmas. My lovely wife bought me a large bag. Shortly afterward I took some large Flames of War sized bases, plus some generic round bases from a show, and I started working out some ideas in my head.

The idea was to create:

1) Stand alone trees
2) Trees that would work together in rows
3) A pond or two

 For the first part of my basing I'd relied on polyfiller, the cheap homebrand ones in places like B&Q. Since then I'd had a moment where brown window sealant caught my eye.

I bought a long tube of it from the 99p store, whacked it in my caulking gun and made a sampler to see if it did what I wanted.

I personally like everything about it as a basing material. It has a number of advantages over polyfiller:
 - it weighs less,
 - it's much more malleable,
 - it looks more durable,
 - it won't crack (I think)
 - it takes paint, stones or other adds ons really well

Simply - take a base, add a triggerfull of the brown caulk.

Create the shapes you want:
 - a ring of it for a pond (adding stones around the edge, or even a mini pier as you can see in the bottom left corner of the picture below
 - a layer deep enough to submerge the roots of your trees
 - a bank on one side of a base, or a gully
 - a fence line with either small pieces of kebab skewer or coffee stirrer sticks
 - an abandoned MG nest, sandbags as an OP for a sniper team
 - kebab skewers for old tree stumps
 - an equipment store

The limits are really what you can imagine and create.

 Putting two of the type of trees I had on to a single large base was a squeeze. My solution was to put them in the corners. With a tree in each corner of a base you can make a row of bases to create a thick tree line which I you can designate as concealment. The only thing you've got to do is if you're using top left and bottom right, then stick to it. Otherwise if you put one in the bottom left and top right then they won't sit flush with each other. I did a set of each in the end, plus the ponds.

The caulk is dry within 12 hours. I guess you can add stones etc at any point during those hours.

Regarding tank tracks - I found with polyfiller and this caulk, that tank tracks can be added, but you may end up with some of the filler/caulk on your tracks if you indent them too early. I don't have spare sets of tracks, and I don't want gunk left on my tanks, so I tried something else. A thin coffee stirrer (or a thick one cut or sanded down) and some patience and you can create sets of tightly packed parallel lines which represent tank tracks.

Next time painting them