FAQs

All of our cannabis is grown in living organic soil beds on Salt Spring Island — either sun-grown outdoors or under LEDs in small indoor lots, depending on the strain. We use no synthetic nutrients, no synthetic growing medium, and no pesticides. Plants are watered exclusively with collected rainwater and hand-tended through every stage of growth.

Living soil is a growing medium built around biology rather than chemistry. Instead of feeding plants with synthetic nutrients, living soil relies on the relationship between microorganisms — bacteria, fungi, and other organisms — and the plant's root system. The microbes break down organic matter in the soil and make nutrients available to the plant naturally. The result is a more complex root environment and, in our experience, better terpene retention. Our living soil beds are reused and amended season after season — no single-use growing medium, no plastic pots.

FVOPA stands for the Fraser Valley Organic Producers Association — a BC-based certifying body that audits farms against organic production standards. GOOD BUDS has been FVOPA Certified for both indoor and outdoor cannabis cultivation since 2020. It means a third party has verified that our inputs, growing medium, and practices meet certified organic standards. It's the closest thing to an organic certification that exists for cannabis in BC.

Our farm is FVOPA Certified Organic. That means everything we grow is grown in accordance to FVOPA-Organic standards. No pesticides. No synthetic chemical fertilizers. However, not every product that leaves our farm can carry an organic claim at the product level — some SKUs may undergo post-harvest processes like irradiation, which affects product-level organic status. When in doubt, look for the FVOPA certification mark on the packaging, or check the label.

Our plants are irrigated exclusively with rainwater we collect on-site — no municipal water, no synthetic nutrient additives. We don't add anything to the water. This is part of how we keep inputs as clean and natural as possible from the ground up.

e collect rainwater on-site and use it exclusively to irrigate our plants — no municipal water, no nutrient additives. In conventional cannabis growing, producers often "flush" plants with plain water in the final weeks before harvest to clear out residual synthetic nutrients. We've never needed to do that because we've never used synthetic nutrients. Our plants are grown in living soil from start to finish, fed only by what the soil biology produces naturally and the water we collect from rain.

It means we developed our strains ourselves rather than licensing genetics from a seed bank or another producer. Gluerangutan, for example, was pheno-hunted from 150,000 plants over three outdoor seasons before we selected the phenotype we grow today. We own these genetics — they're exclusive to our farm.

Tyler has been selecting and breeding cannabis genetics since before legalization. The process starts with growing out large numbers of plants from seed. In Gluerangutan's case, 150,000 plants over three outdoor seasons. Then we evaluate each one for structure, aroma, THC, trichome density, and terpene profile. The plants that stand out get selected, backcrossed, and grown again. It takes years to stabilize a phenotype worth bringing to market. Most licensed producers work with genetics they license from seed banks or other breeders. This ensures consistency. We grow ours from selections we made ourselves, which means the strains are exclusive to our farm and can't be easily replicated elsewhere.

It comes down to what each strain does best. Gluerangutan and Timewarp are sun-grown outdoors — they both perform better outside, developing denser structure and stronger terpene profiles in natural light. Mango Cake is grown indoors under LEDs, where we can control the environment to get the consistency and flavour expression the strain calls for. The decision is always strain-first, not cost-first.

es — all of it, whether grown indoors or outdoors. Hang-drying preserves the structure of the buds and allows for a slower, more controlled dry. We run a minimum 14-day hang-dry followed by a slow cure. The timeline is set by the plant, not the schedule.

We hang dry whole branches in climate-controlled rooms after harvest. This slow, whole-plant approach preserves trichome structure and allows moisture to dissipate evenly — which shows up in the texture, aroma, and burn of the finished flower. We don't tumble dry or use fast-dry equipment, since they tend to ruin the terpene profile from the plant and make inferior tasting buds.

Our farm is FVOPA Certified Organic, which means no synthetic inputs are ever used at the cultivation level. However, some cannabis products in Canada — including some of ours — are irradiated after harvest as a requirement for meeting Health Canada's microbial standards. We don’t irradiate as a standard practice. It’s only done when a batch requires it to pass Health Canada’s strict microbial limits. Where a product has been irradiated, it cannot carry an "organic" product claim even if it was grown organically. We're transparent about this. Check the product label for batch-specific information.

Outdoor cultivation eliminates the two biggest energy draws in cannabis production: artificial lighting and industrial HVAC. Our outdoor crop runs on sunlight. Our indoor production uses living soil in small micro-lot batches rather than single-use rockwool or synthetic hydroponic systems. We also use rainwater as our primary irrigation source, which reduces municipal water draw. We're not perfect, but we're building toward lower-impact growing at every stage.

Not necessarily — and this is something we think about a lot. Organic certification covers what goes into the soil and onto the plants. It doesn't govern what happens to the growing media afterward. Many certified organic producers use single-use plastic pots filled with pre-made organic soil mixes that get discarded after each harvest. That's certified organic, but it's not regenerative. At Good Buds, we use raised soil beds that we've been amending and reusing since 2019. The soil gets better each cycle. Nothing gets thrown out.

The gap is significant. Research consistently puts indoor cannabis among the most energy-intensive agricultural operations in existence — lighting, HVAC, dehumidification, and CO2 injection running around the clock. Outdoor cultivation eliminates all of that. The numbers vary by study and region, but the directional finding is consistent: outdoor-grown cannabis produces a fraction of the greenhouse gas emissions of equivalent indoor production. We're working on a more detailed breakdown of what our specific acreage translates to — that post is coming. In the meantime, the short version is: sunlight is free, and we use a lot of it.

Reusing and amending our raised soil beds is the whole point of living soil farming. Each cycle, we add organic amendments — compost, cover crops, microbial inoculants — to rebuild what the plants took out. Over time, the soil gets better, not depleted. It's the opposite of how most commercial cannabis operations work, and it's what "regenerative" actually means in practice.