So... I did a little more on this. I Found some very fine tan ballast at Hobby Lobby and I applied that to the painted base that the structure sits on. For my adhesive, I use a white glue/water mixture, which I brushed on. Then I sprinkled the ballast onto the wet bonding mixture. After waiting a few minutes for the glue to dry. I turn the base on it's side and let the loose stuff fall off. What I ended up with was a nice thin layer of sandy dirt.
The clumps of static grass are just that. A while back I bought a package of grass clumps at the gaming shop. You actually just pull the clumps of grass off of an adhesive backing and glue them into your scenery. This place was selling the stuff as foliage for war gaming figure bases, put it was the perfect size for O Scale.
The rose bush and the sunflowers are products from a company called JTT, which I think used to be produced by MRC (and perhaps MRC owns JTT... I don't know). You can buy all sorts of plants and crops from this company in both O and HO Scale. I got the stuff that I have from Hobby Lobby. I placed these up against the side of the building to supply a little "organic" color. You can sort of see a little better what those grass clumps look like in this picture. The Station is mostly done at this point, but there are some signs that will be added to the building and a whole lot of castings.
Below are some of the castings that will be used on the station. Some of them had to be cleaned up a bit first because of mold lines, etc. After taking this picture, I used white glue to lightly glue them to a piece of wood strip, which will make painting a whole lot easier. I wanted to have a figure in the scene, once this fellow is cleaned up and painted, I will have him walking toward the front door of the station.
That's about it for this update...got to go do some painting - PM