I’ve been giving it to everyone that I give veg, flower, or cannabis seeds and plants to, I really think there’s no simpler way to get folks past the fear of killing plants than telling them the magic beads do everything and they should just water regularly and occasionally add the stuff I give them in old spice shaker jars, which is mostly Recharge, Maxicrop, or some micronized rock from a local place called Stoned Dust.
I’ve been giving people a $120 container garden recipe all spring from Lowe’s and Walmart:
Lowe’s:
$35 6cf bale of Sunshine 4 Pro Aggregate mix with mycorrhizae
$5 bag of river sand
Wal-Mart (online, free shipping)
$25 Wiggle Worm castings 30#
$12.50 for 4# Dr Earth Tomato and Veg 4-6-3
$14 Osmocote Plus Indoor-Outdoor 15-9-12 with micros 2#
$12 Alaska Fish Emulsion 5-1-1 32oz
$12.50 Earth Science fast acting gypsum 2.5#
$6 Bonide Insecticidal Super Soap (potassium salts with Spinosad 16oz RTU spray
$7 Bonide Bt Thuricide 16 oz RTU spray
And then either pickle/olive/etc 1-5g white buckets drilled out with some gravel in the bottom, or those panda film grow sacks that are dirt cheap. I keep telling people to just get this shit and mix it up and they’ll have no problem growing a buttload of produce or cannabis with it, with no issues and a soil mix that’s ready to use again next year no worries.
If they want more volume I just tell them to add some good double milled black mulch and a $6 30# bag of composted cow or chicken manure, and a bag of landscaping pumice, or just find leaf mold and more sand, or just double the Sunshine. Lots of options but I figured that having a basic recipe just over $100 that fills a patio or garden is a good start for a lot of people.
If they really want to go for it with a mineral-based living soil I recommend they add smectite clay like bentonite or Montmorillonite which are also known as Fuller’s Earth and are very cheap. And some greensand for glauconite, landscaping or aquarium pumice for silica and to aerate the mix back up, and basalt/granite rock dusts.
At that point you’ve got a nice peat base just packed with lots of nice clay, sand, and other minerals, with a time release salt fertilizer and a pretty complicated organic structure from the worm castings and Dr Earth mix (which is a lot of fish bone meal and alfalfa and other stuff all conveniently mixed and spiked with beneficial microbes and fungi) with a bunch of fish guts for microbe breakfast whenever you toss some in. Plus “forest floor products” from your (hot mulched) black bark and shit, and leaf mold if ya scraped some up from the woods. Pretty nice, powerful mix that should be lightweight but nutrient-packed, since oxygen plus water plus microbes and decay/weathering equals plant food, and the Osmocote is going to take things to the next level like some anabolic steroids.
Nobody’s gone for it that hard yet but I’ve basically drawn myself a plan to reboot my soil mix if I ever feel the need to do it, and it’s been a good thought exercise for getting my own garden together this year.