I can source bone meal for next to nothing over here but from what you saying it seems crab meal is too good to be left out ! Guano is readily available here so wont have any problem sourcing that.
I had a look at the link although for some odd reason amazon wants to charge about 400$ for shipping.that kind of stuff, same thing happened when i tried to order green sand. I will have to do some more searching, i did however stumble across a post where a person dried & crushed up their own crustacean/shellfish, possibly an option ?
I unfortunately dont have any compost on hand, open to any suggestions on that man.
Thanks again
Crab Meal (like Neem and Kelp meal) is so wonderful and highly recommended because they are single ingredient amendments that do a wide variety of different things. They also don't burn, so you don't need to let it "cook" like you do with Blood/Bone/Alfalfa Meals or Guano.
The Crab Meal is a good, steady, and light supply of macro and micro nutrients as well as IPM in the form of chitin. Only reason I'm not using it anymore is because I can't afford an RO set up and well water is all I've got, so I have to get rid of any amendments with Calcium in them. Since you're using RO water you won't have this issue. I use 0-5-0 Guano and Insect Frass in it's place, but as you can see it takes me 2 amendments to give similar results as to what the Crab Meal does alone. That is the main benefit of Crab Meal, just means you have to spend less money/source less products.
Are you not from the US or something? Maybe that's why the shipping is so absurdly high because I linked from Amazon.com instead of Amazon.ca? I have no idea on that one. All you have to do to get Prime 2 day shipping is sign up for the free trial, then cancel it immediately. You'll get a free month of Prime, and you can create as many fake emails to do this infinitely. I mainly recommended the Build a Soil blend because it has everything you could possibly need and only sets you back ~$20. Simple, convenient, and affordable.
You can absolutely grind up your own crustacean shells though once they've dried out, be it crab, lobster, or shrimp. Add the dust to your soil, compost pile, or worm bin and you're set. It's just that making your own is significantly more costly than buying it, unless you know of places you can get the shells for cheap/free then buying it will be cheaper and easier.
Not having compost is going to be an issue, without compost you have nothing but dirt. Fortunately, you only need 20g of soil so that makes things somewhat easy as you'll only need 1cu.ft. of compost, aeration, and peat/coco.
You'll have to scope out your local hardware stores and/or their websites to see what they have on hand, or you can source it from Amazon if you get Prime shipping.
If you're willing to spend the money, Amazon sells a 1 cu.ft. bag of Coast of Maine's Lobster Compost for ~$27 with free Prime Shipping. In the 7+ years I've been doing organics, CoM's Lobster Compost is the absolute best compost I've ever dealt with. Only reason I didn't get it was because I needed 12 cuft of compost, and 12 x $27 was way out of my budget. My local hardware store had bags of Black Gold compost for $8/cuft so that was my best option.
My recommendation is getting the Lobster Compost, since you only need 1cuft and your plants will love you for using that stuff. Your other options are to take a look at what your local hardware stores and nurseries have. I got pretty lucky finding the Black Gold product at Ace Hardware, Home Depot/Lowes typically sell crap from Scotts/Miracle Gro and I recommend avoiding those like the plague. Craigslist is also another option, you may find someone selling either compost or worm castings. I don't recommend buying worm castings online, it's usually mediocre at best. If you're looking at buying compost online, CoM's Lobster Compost all the way.
Sorry for the long winded reply, I hope it was useful to you.
