How to add nails to a cactus

Support Modeling
1

I am a beginner and I just made a cactus. Now I want to add nails to the cactus.
How should I do this?
Of course I could use a texture with nails but then they are not 3D.

2

You could create a hair particle system and use duplicates of a single “nail” that will basically be placed instead of every hair.

3

Cycles hair itself does pretty good job. In case if you use cycles renderer. Sample