Bare bone minimum for me in a guerilla type grow would to be go find some naturally composted leaves and debris throw some down the planting hole and and side dress the plant easy peasy no cost! Except for gas to get to the place! lol
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I’m trying a very basic, water only, recipe here now. I got everything except the kelp from Home de Pot.
Lavender Cowyboy’s Mix:
5 parts Sphagnum peat moss
3 parts perlite
2 parts compost
1 cup per cubic foot dolomite
Per cubic foot I added
1/2 cup kelp meal
1/2 cup blood meal
1 cup bone meal
Cost breakdown:
3 cubic foot bag of peat moss $15
2 cubic foot bag of perlite $16
1 cubic foot mushroom compost $3
(free if you make your own)
5 pounds kelp meal (hydro store) $15
6.75 pounds dolomite lime $6
3.5 pounds blood meal $8
4 pounds bone meal $8
Total: $71 for about 5-6 cubic feet of soil.
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Exactly this. After mixing and hauling soil, digging holes in the sun in 35C, and then watering when it hadn’t rained for weeks, I had 4 Cindy 99 seedlings that were extras and dug a spade depth hole with some leaf litter mulch, a handful of osmocote and in the end they were only a bit smaller than those that got all the attention. So it depends a bit on the environment you start with.
In one place I used to live, the soil was basically so dead that rejuvenation was a lost cause, and digging a hole needs a jackhammer, I used half hessian(jute) bags. If you chop them in half, fill them with dirt you can seal up the ends with hog ring pliers, which gives you a 25 litre bag of good to go dirt in it’s own mulch bag. Then all I did was drop in on the ground, punch a hole in the middle and put a seedling in it. It worked a treat and depending on access can be easier than digging holes.
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I am not such a big fan of perlite and guerrilla growing myself. Don’t get me wrong, I love the stuff and I would and have used it, but the stuff is just so damn messy it’s hard to keep it all as stealthy as I would like. It doesn’t break down leaves a patch looking like a blizzard has been through. That sticks out like dogs balls over in the mostly brown environment here 
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I’m thinking more for aeration of the roots. We get a lot of rain here. So I’m thinking good aeration and planted on a slope. (I’ll probably need ropes to get up to where they’re going) but it will still only be 20-30 ft from a fresh water source too. I imagine perlite would go unnoticed given the circumstances but I fully appreciate where you’re headed with that.
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Vermiculite or even better medium fine charcoal are some other viable alternatives. The coir itself helps to aerate boggy soils but can itself get a bit boggy if it’s constantly saturated wet so something like perlite or similar to break it up is always good imho. Charcoal/biochar works to aerate as well as help keep nutrients accessible to the plant AND it’s lightweight if you have to lug it. I’ve used charcoal used in open char bbq’s here, I have to break it up a bit but it goes for only $8 a bag and works well.
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I hear DE is worthless after it gets wet and the purpose is defeated by doing so?
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might be able to stain perlite with humic acid… old perlite from my bottom drain layer in a SIP/Earthbox is rust colored. if i get REALLY bored i may do an experiment… 
and it does decompose-- into SAND! and then toxic hazardous dust.
silicosis. 
my lungs are fragile enough 
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I’m not too fussed about the white in there anyway to be honest. If someone stumbles on the perlite they stumbled on the plant. Humic acid won’t do any harm though so worth a crack big tree man definitely.
I planted 6 LD x LR the other day in Coco. Left with no heat or light source and 6 of 6 are up. Slightly elongated but absolutely fine. @ReikoX what kinda Dr Frankenstein are you. 10/10 for stress resistance so far. Definitely a good sign for old blighty weather
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The cheapest soil I ever built that worked was:
1 part pumice
1 part “manure” (the $1 bag stuff that’s just the beef industry’s fouled cow bedding bagged up).
1 part dirt & as much leaf debris as was covering it.
A couple cups of all-in-one organic fertilizer.
The plants were nothing to brag about, but I still got decent results.
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DE? Apols it’s a bit early for me this morning.
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Diatomaceous Earth
Disco Eggplant 
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Ahh, got it, thanks 
So it depends on what the DE is being used for, if it’s as a pesticide then yes it loses effectiveness when wet, but I typically don’t use it for this purpose so much outdoors but mainly for it’s ability to hold water and release it to the roots as needed as well as it’s cation exchange capacity.
Basically in this situation you WANT it wet as it absorbs a large amount of water relative to weight, and holds onto nutrients, reducing leaching and effectively releasing them to the plant as required. Also DE being silicon dioxide and typically finely ground provides a good source of accessible silicon to the plant, which if you live in an area where silicon can be locked up in quartz or soils high in kaolinite clay DE can be a very good source.
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FWIW there’s a video on OG by Gabe Brown I’ve posted here whose farmland fields are close approaching 10% organic matter and he talks of a rain that lasted over two days and 13” fell on his land it pretty much held it all! Now That’s impressive! Good vid to watch!
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I’ve read that biochar is fairly useless unless it’s charged first
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Again, that is my understanding too, but I guess it depends on it’s purpose. If it’s more structure and aeration then not so much an issue I would have thought.
I probably should have left biochar out of it and just called it charcoal because as you have pointed out there is a difference. That said, activation is simply soaking in a good tea/soup of nutrients. In my garden I just throw the charcoal in a tub and drench it in organic teas and then let it sit for a few weeks, or months depending on how motivated I am. From my understanding charcoal/bichar again has good cation exchange capability, thus the ‘charging’ as you mentioned. So then my assumption is that this is a two way exchange, and free surplus nutrient cations will be bound by the charcoal rather than remaining free to be leached out of the root zone?
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Thanks for this…I will be trying this out on a small batch, in the near future.
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IIRC, it has a HUGE CEC! It’s a big porous chunk o’ carbon, provides homes for microbes, and adds acidity… and that’s how biochar/tierra prieta evolved.
+ 
+ 
= 
I can’t remember which, maybe in ‘teaming w/microbes’? or another soil book, but humic & fulvic acids have CECs of 400+ & 1400+!
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I think you and I are on the same wavelength friend! Both of these work wonders in both soil and in hydro. These are the only adjuncts I use other than a pretty standard-ish Lucas formula.
They turn your tubs into this:
But the difference when using them is large in terms of overall plant health, growth, resistance to pests and disease but also overall plant branching and bud density. I’m pretty sure they cytokines in the kelp meal are a big part of the denser branching you seem to get.
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I think I know what book I read those numbers in but here’s an online “reference” citing the same #'s Note: they are a sller of humic acid 
" humic acid has a CEC of 450meq/100g and fulvic acid has a CEC of 1,450meq/100g. "
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