Three things we do that don't scale — and why we do them anyway
By Alex Rumi
There are three things we do at GOOD BUDS that, on a spreadsheet, look like bad decisions.
We hand-buck every plant after a long, slow, whole-plant hang dry. We pheno-hunted 160,000 seeds we ordered from the Netherlands to develop our own genetics from scratch. We farm in living soil beds that have been running continuously since 2019 — beds we keep building rather than replacing between cycles. None of these is efficient. We do them because, season after season, they're what shows up in the jar.
This isn't a virtue post. These are decisions with real costs. They were harder to justify in year one than they are now. Here's what each of them actually involves, and why we still make the same call every season.
1. We hand-buck after a long, slow whole-plant hang dry
When we harvest, the plants come down whole. They hang to dry, slowly, for as long as the room and the season let us — not the speed-dry timeline that gets you to market faster. Once the buds are properly dry, we hand-buck them. That means stripping the buds by hand, one at a time, before they reach the trim line.
There are faster ways to do this. Some machines buck wet, some machines buck dry, and they all work. We've looked at them. We keep coming back to hands.
The reason is gentleness. A dry, terpene-rich bud is fragile. The trichome heads — where most of the aroma and resin reside — sit on the surface and break off when the bud is subjected to hard mechanical contact. You can feel the difference between a bud that's been handled gently and one that's been knocked around in a machine. It's in the tackiness of picking one up. It's in how much aroma you lose when you crack a jar.
So we keep paying people to do it slowly, by hand, even though it's the most labour-intensive step in our entire post-harvest process. The trim line happens after, by machine — but by the time the buds reach it, the structure is intact. That's the trade we make.
“You can tell a hand-bucked bud apart from one that’s been through a machine. The shape’s still there. The aroma is still on the bud, not on the floor of the machine.”
2. We pheno-hunted 160,000 seeds from the Netherlands
In 2017, when we got licensed, the genetics question was already a fork in the road. Most producers entering the regulated market took the obvious path — they bought clones from another LP. Same starting material, same circulating gene pool, similar strains showing up across the industry.
We went the other way. We ordered 160,000 seeds from a breeder in the Netherlands because, at the time, that was the only legal channel to bring in different genetics into a Canadian-licensed facility. Some of what we ordered, funny enough, turned out to be California or BC genetics that the Netherlands had acquired and stabilised over the years — but the only legal way for us to get them was through that channel.
Then we ran them all. In the field. For two seasons.
When you grow F1 seeds — first-generation, unstabilised — you don't get a uniform crop. You get the full spectrum: good, bad, and ugly. We had inconsistent yields. We had plants that didn't perform. We pulled phenotypes that excited us and those that made us regret the row. And we made notes on every one of them, season after season, narrowing down the ones that earned a place.
That's how Gluerangutan exists. It came out of pheno-hunting through that 160,000-seed run, then three more seasons of backcrossing OG Kush, GG4, and Afghani Hash Plant lines we'd selected. The mother stock we work from today — the clones running in our beds — is field-proven. They survived two BC outdoor seasons before we ever cloned them. They were resilient because the field made them prove it.
The honest version of this story is that it cost us early. The yields and consistency we gave up in those first years were real. As an R&D programme, it was harder to justify than buying clones would have been, especially in a tight cash period for the industry.
However, the strains we're known for now are uniquely ours. They weren't cut from a sheet of clones circulating in the regulated system. That's the dividend we're collecting today, eight seasons in.
3. We farm in living soil beds that have been running since 2019
The third decision is the slowest of the three.
We grow in living soil beds — outdoor and indoor — that we built starting in 2019 on rocky, depleted ground. We don't replace the soil between cycles. Each season, we amend, we cover-crop, we let the biology rebuild and compound. The beds get better with age, not worse.
There's a reason most operations don't do this. Cycling fresh substrate is faster, more predictable, and easier to QA. You know exactly what your inputs are because you put them there last week. With a living-soil bed, year one is the hardest. The biology hasn't caught up. The yields are humbler than they'll be later. You're investing in something that will pay off in year three, year five, year eight.
“By year three, you start to see what the soil’s actually doing for you. The plants need less. The structure’s better. The flavours come up cleaner. You can’t shortcut that — you just have to keep feeding the bed and let it build.”
We're now eight seasons in. The beds where Gluerangutan grows aren't the same beds we started with — they're those beds plus eight years of compost teas, cover crops, and a microbiome we've been cultivating the whole time. It’s not a marketing line. It's just what happens when you stop replacing things and start building them.
Why these three, when none of them is efficient
These aren't decisions we make to feel good about ourselves. They're decisions we make because, over time, we think they're the right ones — and because we're trying to build a brand that customers can trust over the long run rather than over the next quarter.
The short-term version of this business has always been clear. Buy clones. Replace soil—Buck with machines. Move faster. Hit margins. We know that the path is there. We've been around it long enough to understand exactly what it costs and exactly what it saves.
We've also been around long enough to make our own mistakes. There have been years when cash was tight, and the temptation to compromise was real. We haven't always got every call right. But the throughline we keep coming back to — and the one we want our customers to be able to count on — is that we're trying to do the work properly, put out only what we'd be proud to put our names on, and price it fairly.
If you're picking up a jar of GOOD BUDS, that's what these three decisions are paying for. Not the marketing of craft. The actual cost of it.
Alex Rumi is co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer at GOOD BUDS, an FVOPA Certified Organic cannabis farm on Salt Spring Island, BC. He has worked in the licensed Canadian cannabis industry since 2017.
Good Buds is family-grown, living soil organic cannabis from Salt Spring Island, BC. Available at 900+ retailers across British Columbia, Alberta, and Ontario. Get Farm Updates →
