I've been working on the assumption that I'd be able to use static grass with my electric tea-strainer and get through the scenery on Whitemarsh quite quickly. So I did some tests and ended up doing something almost completely different with the same materials.

Possibly because this is 4mm scale using 6mm Noch grass fibres, the electric tea-strainer didn't do too well - see the right-hand patch here:

I needed to use neat PVA to get the fibres to stick, and they weren't all that static or standy-uppy. When I used it a couple of years ago with 2mm Woodland Scenics fibres it was much better. So I was a bit disappointed and worried that I didn't have a back-up plan. Then I remembered this awesome video from Rick Reimer I'd seen a couple of weeks ago on another forum:

I have a can of Super 77, so I sprayed a test patch and had a go. It's the left-hand one in the image above. Much more standy-uppy, but less coverage, more like tussocks and weeds than tall grass. But for Whitemoor/Whitemarsh this might be OK, there isn't really lush grass. It's easy (especially with the small scale short grass) to end up crushing the bits you've just stuck down, and you also need some sprinkly stuff to scatter over any remaining glue. It looks really good in profile, it's just that you can see the bald patches from above.

I had another go which went even better (ignore the bright green tussock which is from a Mininatur sheet)

What I didn't think it'd work for is the drain banks, which need to be ultra-lush, so I thought I'd try combining this at the top, with use of grass mats (Noch again) at the bottom, torn up into little bits as seen in a CM article on Vinkeveen, one of my all time favourite layouts. This is what you can see below, and in the header image. I started with a layer of PVA glue and some fine sieved crushed earth, gravel, and some Woodland Scenics ground foam. Then spray glue and hairy cigars at the top, and a jigsaw of the Noch grass mats at the bottom.

It's not perfect - I think cutting the mats with scissors would make it look less tussocky, and you can see rather too much where the different materials start and finish, but I think it's going in the right direction. I'm now doing a larger patch of grass at the rear-right of the layout in the same way to see how that comes out. I'm going to try using PVA for the mats on that one as well - here they're stuck with the same Super 77 which doesn't really give enough working time.