Balancing Soil Minerals
Hi All- Michael Astera here. I'm starting this thread hoping to get a discussion going about the connection between soil minerals and world class cannabis.
Some ICMag members know me from the soilminerals dot com website or from The Ideal Soil book, or from email correspondence and working together on soil fertility projects. I joined ICMag in 2010 but have had little time to read or post here until now. The last couple of years I've been working on several full time projects, but I promised myself I would get back to spend some time at ICMag, because cannabis growing is the cutting edge of agriculture today.
How and why is cannabis the cutting edge? Because, at least at the more refined levels, growers are concerned about aesthetics: flavor, aroma, subtle differences in physiological and psychological effects. Most of agriculture is concerned only with yield, appearance, uniformity, and perhaps shipping and storage qualities. This criticism applies just as much to organic agriculture as it does to chemical agriculture. When was the last time you ate a piece of fruit from the store that had truly outstanding flavor, sweetness, complexity? Neither organic nor chemical agriculture has much of a clue about how to grow sweet, flavorful fruit or high-protein grains or nutrient-dense tasty vegetables. Both are playing the NPK game; the only real difference is their sources of NPK and whether they are using synthetic or "natural" remedies for weeds, insects, and disease.
A further problem is plant breeding and genetics. For at least the last sixty years, fruit trees, grains, and vegetable varieties have been bred and selected solely for the attributes listed above: Yield, appearance, uniformity, and shipping/storage qualities, not flavor or nutrient content or health benefits. Cannabis growers, on the other hand, have put great thought and effort into selecting strains that produce the finest aesthetic and medicinal qualities.
I grew my first "successful" cannabis crop in 1976. At the time I was living in a small rental house in a large Midwestern city. I set out about a dozen plants, along with an equal number of Crackerjack marigolds, in the space between the sidewalk and the foundation on the side of the house. By midsummer both the cannabis and the marigolds were budding and beginning to bloom. The lawn hadn't been mowed since spring and was knee-high, so I hired a local kid to mow it one day while I was at work. When I came home I found that he had mowed the flower bed as well, thinking it was all just weeds. Luckily he hadn't raked, so I spent a frantic hour digging through the nearby grass clippings and managed to save almost an ounce of leaf and buds. Since then I have grown whenever the opportunity arose, including a few years of commercial growing and plant breeding outdoors in the Pacific NW.
In Venezuela where I now live the laws against cannabis are harsher than the US, so I grow only a vegetable garden; my involvement with cannabis growing is limited to advising others on soil fertility.
Hi All- Michael Astera here. I'm starting this thread hoping to get a discussion going about the connection between soil minerals and world class cannabis.
Some ICMag members know me from the soilminerals dot com website or from The Ideal Soil book, or from email correspondence and working together on soil fertility projects. I joined ICMag in 2010 but have had little time to read or post here until now. The last couple of years I've been working on several full time projects, but I promised myself I would get back to spend some time at ICMag, because cannabis growing is the cutting edge of agriculture today.
How and why is cannabis the cutting edge? Because, at least at the more refined levels, growers are concerned about aesthetics: flavor, aroma, subtle differences in physiological and psychological effects. Most of agriculture is concerned only with yield, appearance, uniformity, and perhaps shipping and storage qualities. This criticism applies just as much to organic agriculture as it does to chemical agriculture. When was the last time you ate a piece of fruit from the store that had truly outstanding flavor, sweetness, complexity? Neither organic nor chemical agriculture has much of a clue about how to grow sweet, flavorful fruit or high-protein grains or nutrient-dense tasty vegetables. Both are playing the NPK game; the only real difference is their sources of NPK and whether they are using synthetic or "natural" remedies for weeds, insects, and disease.
A further problem is plant breeding and genetics. For at least the last sixty years, fruit trees, grains, and vegetable varieties have been bred and selected solely for the attributes listed above: Yield, appearance, uniformity, and shipping/storage qualities, not flavor or nutrient content or health benefits. Cannabis growers, on the other hand, have put great thought and effort into selecting strains that produce the finest aesthetic and medicinal qualities.
I grew my first "successful" cannabis crop in 1976. At the time I was living in a small rental house in a large Midwestern city. I set out about a dozen plants, along with an equal number of Crackerjack marigolds, in the space between the sidewalk and the foundation on the side of the house. By midsummer both the cannabis and the marigolds were budding and beginning to bloom. The lawn hadn't been mowed since spring and was knee-high, so I hired a local kid to mow it one day while I was at work. When I came home I found that he had mowed the flower bed as well, thinking it was all just weeds. Luckily he hadn't raked, so I spent a frantic hour digging through the nearby grass clippings and managed to save almost an ounce of leaf and buds. Since then I have grown whenever the opportunity arose, including a few years of commercial growing and plant breeding outdoors in the Pacific NW.
In Venezuela where I now live the laws against cannabis are harsher than the US, so I grow only a vegetable garden; my involvement with cannabis growing is limited to advising others on soil fertility.
