If you’ve ever been interested in how your flower is grown, or if you somehow remember your high school biology class, you may know that all plants need basic nutrients to help them grow big and strong. Human beings have known since the late 1800s that certain elements like Nitrogen, Phosphorous, and Potassium (NPK) are essential to plant growth, and the goal of increasing a plant’s levels of these and other nutrients has become a staple of farming practices and products ever since.
Surprise, surprise! This is no different for cannabis. Proper nutrition is absolutely vital to the development of our cannabis plants, allowing them to produce top notch flowers with ripe trichomes full of the THC and terpenes that provide high potency and complex flavors.
As a young industry, though, we see more personal opinions on nutrients than you might with other crops. In the deep internet forums of cannabis cultivation, the world’s top indoor cultivators fiercely debate nutrient recipes and feeding schedules that they swear are the only true methods of growing plants with perfectly dense, tasty buds.
These cannabis masters will add nutrients to their feed in a sort of ad-hoc manner whenever they see certain physical indicators, like a weird leaf color, that lead them to believe the plant is deficient in one nutrient or another. The practice is kind of like when your mom tastes something you’re cooking, makes a face cause she realizes what is missing, and decides to add that spice in for you. Mom, if you’re reading this stay out of my kitchen (and my greenhouse).
If this process sounds complex, it’s because it is.
Instead, imagine a world where our cannabis plants were able to source their own nutrients in perfect ratios, and cultivators didn’t have to be master detectives to get their plants to grow happily and healthily. Guess what!? You’re not far off from how plants in nature actually operate.
Living Soil
Out in the natural world, the soil in which plants grow is full of a rich biodiversity. There are microbes, fungi, worms, all the fun stuff you like to think about. However gross it may be, this small-scale food chain in the soil is what adds real nutrients to your fruits, veggies, and, yes, your weed too!
Plants communicate with the soil they grow in by interacting with the rhizosphere (the area around their roots where microbial life exists). When a plant needs certain nutrients, it offers an exchange of sorts with the microbial life underneath it. By sending down “food,” like carbon and sugars, they keep the microscopic world fed. These well-fed microbes can then break apart other elements or organisms in the soil into these basic macronutrients that the plants need.
When soil is full of rich biodiversity of microbial life, and a full food chain that allows for this exchange, we refer to it as “Living Soil.”
Now, how exactly the plant collects the specific nutrients it needs from Living Soil is a bit complicated, involving smart-people words like ion channels and carrier proteins, but the basic idea is that the plant’s cellular structure and root system are complex enough to transport exactly what is needed, at the time it needs it.
Of course, the plant can only do this when there’s an abundance of microbial life and nutrients in the area around its root system, which is not the case with the average generic potting soil that you find at the market. With the generic stuff, which hasn’t been growing its own ecosystem like Living Soil, our cultivators would once again have to play “nutrient chef” and add in specific macronutrients throughout the growing process.
In reality, we all know these cultivators would have an easier time if they were using Living Soil. Since it’s not that easy to create, though, that’s easier said than done in an indoor setting.
A Difficult Diagnosis
Seeing as it’s difficult to develop proper Living Soil, and generic potting soil has its own challenges like pests and disease, many of today’s indoor cultivators have turned to other growing mediums like rockwool, coco coir, and clay to cultivate indoors. Each of these mediums have their own pros and cons, but the challenge of diagnosing what nutrients a plant needs remains.
While many of today’s indoor cultivators are admittedly quite adept at understanding the nutrient needs of their plants, it does create more complexity and an inferior product when the diagnosis is wrong.
Because Living Soil allows a plant to gather nutrients for itself, it avoids the issues of deficiencies or excesses of nutrients. Both of these situations can be harmful to the cannabis plant and lead to buds with underdeveloped trichomes. This means the cannabinoids, terpenes, and flavonoids that make your flower tasty and effective don’t have the proper amount of time to get produced and stabilized. The result is flower with low potency and lackluster flavor.
This is why there’s been a resurgence in the Living Soil movement recently. Our cannabis plants know what they need to grow, and all we really have to do is provide them an environment where they can seek out all of the macronutrients and micronutrients.
What Does This Mean For the Grower?
You guessed it! What this really means is tending to the soil over longer periods of time, rather than tending only to the plants. By creating a rich biodiversity in the soil, cultivators are saving themselves effort in the long run, while also leading to a much more complex and delicious terpene profile in your flower! On top of that, plants grown in Living Soil can take on certain tastes of the region they’re grown in, which gives cultivators their own unique twist on every strain when done correctly.
Unfortunately, it’s not as easy as just growing outdoors or in a soil medium. Human beings have killed our soil over long periods of time through tilling practices and the use of salt-based fertilizers. While these fertilizers may increase the bioavailability (ability for uptake) of nutrients by the root system, they also lead to a destruction of the microbial life in the soil over time (as does tilling).
Thankfully, there’s a rich history of natural farming methods for us to fall back on to learn how to better feed our plants, and today’s cannabis cultivators have begun refamiliarizing themselves with these practices! If you’re interested in how cultivators are now creating better soil conditions for their plants, and therefore a better product in the long run, check out popular practices like Korean Natural Farming (KNF), Closed-Loop Systems, and Regenerative Farming.
And as always, support farmers that you know are using these practices (you’ll likely see a difference in the plant taste and effects as well).