My farm diorama is "finished" as far as major scenes go, mostly because I'm out of room.
To satisfy my modeling jones, I add little details here and there as they occur to me. One thing you can always use more of is trees.
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Many are commercially available complete trees (or kits) that you can just plant in the landscape. Most of these are less than realistic but okay in a background or planted densely.
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Some I've made from scratch using various things for the trunk and branches and foam or cut paper leaves for the foliage. Much more realistic, but also very time-consuming to make. One-offs are fine, a forest's worth is more work than it's worth.
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I have one tree in the foreground by the house that I've never really been happy with. Too spindly. Being more than a tad bored this Winter, I decided to replace it and also try a couple of new techniques in the process.
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Wire armature trunks and main branches are pretty common and I've used them before. The difference here is that I used MUCH larger wire (welding lead) and soldered the main trunk and then separated out limbs, branches and twigs, soldering smaller and smaller divisions as I went.
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Another difference is that I coated the trunk, major limbs and as many of the branches as I could in air-drying modeler's clay to disguise the wire and have a more bark-like finish.
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After a coat of gray and an overspray of flat black (trees are not brown if you ever noticed) and then teased out some poly fiber to drape over the branches and twigs. It's held in place by a combination of wet paint and hairspray.
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Finally, another generous coating of hairspray (great spray adhesive, and cheap!) I sifted some dark green "leaves" over the fiber, sprayed again and highlighted with some light green leaves. In retrospect, I think the light green is a little too much, I'll add some brown (actual leaves chopped up in a blender) to tone it down.
