We've grown in the same soil since 2019. Here's why we never replace it.
By Tyler Rumi
Most cannabis gets grown in something you throw away.
Plastic pots, coco bags, rockwool cubes — the plant goes in, the crop comes off, and a lot of that medium goes in the bin so the next round can start fresh. It's clean, it's predictable, and it makes a pile of single-use waste every single cycle.
We don't do that. We've been growing in the same living soil since 2019, and we've never replaced it. Not indoors, not outdoors. We amend it, and we grow again.
Indoors, that soil sits in raised beds we built once and have used ever since. Outdoors, it's mounded rows that have been in the ground for the same stretch. No single-use pots to dump. No rockwool to the landfill. The bed is permanent, and the biology in it is the whole point.
Here's the part that took a few seasons to really trust: the soil doesn't wear out. It gets better. Living soil is a whole ecosystem — fungi, bacteria, the network of stuff around the roots that actually feeds the plant. When you tear that out and start over every cycle, you're killing the thing that took months to build and paying for the privilege. When you leave it alone and feed it instead, it compounds. The beds we're growing in now are more alive than they were when we started.
What it looks like day to day is pretty routine. We don't mix up a fresh batch of medium. We don't dial in a feed chart of bottled nutrients. We top-dress before the crop starts; we let the soil life break it down into something the plant can use, and we grow. The soil holds water better than it used to. It holds onto nutrients instead of letting them wash straight through. A lot of the problems people solve with more inputs, we solved by just not destroying the soil in the first place.
There is a pretty big trade-off, however. Living soil is slower and less forgiving than a sterile, fully-controlled feed. You can't just flip a switch and correct it overnight — if something's off, you're working with a biological system on its timeline, not overriding it with a stronger nutrient mix. It takes patience, and it takes years to build up. We think that's a feature. It's also genuinely harder. In our early years, it meant lower yields, smaller buds, and sometimes lower THC.
However, the waste math doesn’t add up. Every harvest, we don't throw out a room's worth of growing medium. Multiply that across seven years, and it's a lot of plastic and spent material that never got made and never went to landfill — for the simple reason that we're still using the dirt we started with.
It’s not a sustainability programme we bolted on. It's how we planned our growth from the start, and it’s a core value and part of our brand’s identity.
Tyler Rumi is co-founder and cultivation lead at GOOD BUDS, Canada's first licensed outdoor cannabis producer. He has grown cannabis in living soil on Salt Spring Island, BC, since 2017.
