Made progress on an experiment, a rather massive terrain piece providing lots of cover ...
I had no sand at hand and was too impatient to get some, so I tried an alternative: Coffee ground.
Mixing it with acrylic color and PVA turned it into an easy to spread paste.
After letting it dry over night I made a fun discovery!
Spoilered because it is a massive image (I will figure out how to post smaller images).
The paste started to crack! I looks like really dried up land, I am heavily contemplating no flocking any of it and start a new range of wasteland terrain.
I will post pictures of the entire piece after drybrushing and cleanup.
One note on degradable materials: The coffee was used almost an hour after brewing coffee, so I would consider it sufficiently desinfected. I have used coffee
to decorate bases before, where I had collected larger amounts and dried it in the oven at ~70°C. I never had an issue with mould or similar.