We water our cannabis with rain. We don't even filter it.
By Tyler Rumi
All the water our plants drink falls out of the sky. We catch it in retention ponds on the property, and that's what we irrigate with for the whole season, start to finish. No municipal water, no well draw, no tap.
And we don't filter it. That part surprises people, so let me explain why we leave it alone.
Our pond water isn't empty. It's full of life — microbes, mycorrhizal fungi, the same kind of biology that makes our soil work. When we pull that water and run it to the roots, all of that goes with it. The plant isn't just getting H₂O; it's getting a living inoculant. Filter it down to sterile water, and you've stripped out the part that's actually doing something. So we don't. The pond, the soil, and the plant are all running the same biology, and we let them talk to each other.
There's a bigger reason this matters for waste, and it has to do with what we don't put in the ground.
A lot of cannabis is fed on bottled synthetic nutrients: nitrogen, potassium, and the rest of it. When you irrigate with that, whatever the plant doesn't take up has to go somewhere. It leaches into the soil and runs off into the watershed. Synthetic nitrogen and phosphorus running off farmland are among the main drivers of algal blooms in lakes and rivers — the nutrients feed an algal explosion, the algae die and rot, and the rot pulls oxygen out of the water. It's one of the leading causes of water damage and habitat destruction worldwide.
We don't have that problem because we're not putting synthetic salts in the ground in the first place. The water we use is rain we caught, and the only thing feeding the plants is organic and FVOPA-certified. Nothing runs off our place that wasn't living water to begin with.
The honest trade-off, though, is that we're at the mercy of how much rain we get and how much we manage to store. We size the ponds for the season. And they fill up fast during the rainy fall and winter seasons on Salt Spring Island. But a dry summer is a real constraint in a way that it isn't for someone with unlimited municipal water. We've chosen to work inside that limit rather than around it.
Give a plant living water, living soil, and the actual sun, and it mostly knows what to do. Our job is not to get in the way of that, and not to leave a mess downstream while we're at it.
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.
