Welcome to Reefer the Reefer the podcast. I'm little farmer your host. Today we got
a great show with Jeremy Silva from Build a Soil. This week's episode is brought to
you by the cannabis connoisseurs coalition. Unfortunately, due to unforeseen difficulties,
tonight's extract games is going to be postponed until February 25th. They have decided to
combine the legendary extract games with the classic Da Vin times event that is going to
be on February 25th. So make sure to reach out to the website to get your tickets. Now
let's get into the show. All right, everyone, welcome back to the show. I'm little farmer
the show is called Reefer the Reefer. I'm here with Jeremy Silva from Build a Soil.
Great soil. It's a Colorado soil. I was recommended by Miles Filippelli from fermented plant extracts
to reach out and get you on here. I wanted to do it anyways. I consult and got a few
clients that use your soil and best to come straight to you and get the information so
they can get it and understand it right from you and not have the middleman. Awesome. Yeah,
I love it. I'm here to help and definitely like talking about soil and really anything
else. So thanks for having me on today. So yeah, the basis of the show we wanted to just
talk to people in the industry, talk about how they got into it, how they got into cannabis,
try to normalize cannabis show that we're not a bunch of freaks and we're normal people.
We can formal work normally consuming cannabis just like there's functional alcoholics out
there and you know, but what actually got you into cannabis? All right. First of all,
are you from Colorado? No, so I'm from California. I grew up in Orange County. I also lived,
I went to freshman year, Rim of the World High School in Lake Arrowhead. So I lived
up in the mountains for a little while and then I lived closer to the beach for a little
while. And so I had a little bit of both of those in my life. My dad lived in Lake Tahoe.
Some of my best memories were in the mountains. Don't get me wrong, love surfing, but I'm
kind of torn. I like snowboarding, like surfing, like the mountains, like the ocean. And so
I ended up coming to Colorado in 2009. And so I've been here, you know, well over a decade
now, almost 15 years. So did you come for the, you came for the mountains then, right?
You didn't come for the cannabis because California already had their cannabis scene there and
I'm sure it's pretty easy to get back then. Yeah, I was coming for a simpler life. I was
at the point in my life where I was looking for change. And when I came out here, you
know, the American dream was still alive as far as, Hey, you could get a home at a regular
type of income and you might be able to have some chickens and some land and have a little
bit of a piece of that. And I grew up in a cul-de-sac. And so that, that wasn't something
that I really saw open to me and staying in California while it was exciting. You know,
the beaches are getting more crowded and home prices are going up and opportunity to start
a business is more challenging. And so it ended up being a big blessing coming here.
Small town, easier to start my business. So definitely came here for other reasons, but
I remember looking up online going, Hey, what's the canvas laws in Colorado? And I knew there
was some, and I knew it was, you know, at least more progressive, but I didn't know
exactly what. And so once I found out that, Hey, not an issue, you can be growing. It
wasn't fully like legitimate yet, as far as a lot of the recreational hadn't passed and
there was a lot of medical going on, but at least it was there. And I even remember Googling,
I think it was a town down the street near Montrose. Cause at that time in California
was easy to go to like a whole row of dispensaries. I mean, you go to one street and there'd be
20 on there, you know, kind of like based on the landlord and you'd go from shop to
shop to see who had the best herb. And so I at least wanted to make sure. And I saw
some guy running a dispensary illegally out of his house in Olathe and ended up getting
shut down, but he was trying to, you know, navigate the holes in the law. And I just
remember thinking, okay, well, at least I'll find, figure something out when I get there.
Well, it turns out it was a lot harder than I expected. California, I mean, I know there's
plenty of urban Colorado, but when I got here and to Western Colorado, I wasn't connected.
And so it was really hard to find decent herb. And so that's really what kickstarted a lot
of my, I've been growing since then, you know, since 2009 straight now before then a DAPL
a little, but it was a necessity. And so I started to learn a lot around that time.
So what, what, what got you started in consuming? Was it a medical need or more just recreational
or a little bit of both?
recreational. I would say like when you, so when I moved to Colorado for me to get my
medical card, they wanted to list a physical ailment pain, something like that. But in
California, one of the prerequisites was, Hey, are you feeling stressed? Cause that's
not very healthy, you know, and I was running a business and it can definitely add some
stress. And I feel like for whatever reason, my productive mind, I've used it as something
to lean on to calm that down. So I started in college. I didn't really smoke in high
school and I noticed that just keeping my busy schedule, being able to decompress and
allow me to just really focus, be in the moment, live in the now. And while that can be a burden
sometimes, I found ways where it just really benefited my life. So I would kind of set
my to do list, figure out what I needed to get done. And then I would smoke where a lot
of times if I smoked and then try to come up with what to do, that's kind of where the
problem lies. And this plant has been part of my life since I found it and pretty much
full force. Like as soon as I, as soon as I found that I remember thinking, okay, well
I'll always smoke maybe on the weekends or something. And then pretty soon you're like,
why is like coffee? Like I just enjoy this as part of my day. And then once you build
that tolerance up as somebody, you know, first start smoking, obviously it's a little bit
more potent, a little bit more recreational, but eventually it becomes like having a cup
of coffee. You just kind of balance it out.
Yep. It's the same way with me. It's all day, every day, whenever I need it, it helps
me focus. That's a big thing. I get a little ADHD and I get going in two or three different
directions and it's easy to just take a toke or two and get focused and focus on one thing
and get it done.
Yeah. It's definitely a blessing in that regard. I noticed a lot of my, our customers, a lot
of people that relate to me in that regard, they feel like it helps narrow that, that
ADHD so to speak, or that wild mind. And I definitely have something like that. And I
remember when I first started Build A Soil, it was a big deal. It was like, do I talk
about smoking and growing and all this and public? What happens if I need another job
in the future? And I know a lot of us go through this phase in our life. I'm certainly past
it now. I almost can't remember what it was like, partially because of the laws changing,
partially just getting older and being fine with who you are. But I remember for a period
of time thinking, maybe this is hurting my life and I shouldn't be doing this based on
what I hear other people saying. And I started to realize doctors, lawyers, attorneys, everybody
that I dealt with in life, a lot of times they're like, yeah, Blaze, you know, you're
like, really you're successful. It's like, well, yeah, I've managed, I have lots of things
that I like in my life and I just balance them. And so I think I started to realize
that it wasn't to blame the plant. It was more the person. And certain people can obviously
use any of these things as a heck. I can go to the coffee pot and make six cups of coffee
and waste a whole bunch of time. And so I feel like once I understood that, I kind of
dropped the excuses.
Yeah. There's some people that shouldn't be smoking, I believe, because they get really
lazy. Other people, it does the opposite. It kind of gets them amped up, kind of just
on the strain too. Do you have a specific strain or type of weed you like to smoke?
I like them all. I definitely have some specifics, but I've noticed that they all resonate pretty
well with me. Occasionally I get like when I used to have to buy it and not grow it,
there'd be some time where I'm like, man, that particular sack did not leave me very
feeling very productive. And I'd imagine maybe looking back, maybe it was aged or oxidized,
maybe some CBN in there or something sleepier. But for the most part, as long as it's something
that I'm growing and it's fresh, whether it's narrow leaf or broad leaf or any of these
things, I tend to enjoy it just as much. I do go back to the fuelier, stronger. I really
do like chem D crosses and I look for stuff that has that pallet coating, kind of fuel,
herb, gas. Like I like that. I definitely, I remember the first time I started growing
some of like Agent Orange and you know, Lemon G and some of these more interesting tropical
terps. I just, I felt like they were exciting, but then after a while you're kind of like,
man, it'd be nice to have just some fuel, some gas. And so I tend to be pretty predominant
in that I could smoke it all day, every day. Where if I have some something orange or something
tropical, I enjoy it. But for whatever reason, I tend to switch away and then come back,
use it kind of like as a treat or as a flavor. Yeah, me too. I like, I like the tinctures.
Actually I'm making some tinctures. I got some tangy tincture. I make it full spectrum
extract and it tastes really good when you put it in some tea. That's my new thing. I'm
trying to cut down on smoking. I got tea. Yeah, absolutely. I understand that. Like
one of the things about smoking and part of the reason why I think initially I started
growing in soil and looking to the organic way is like all of us, I was concerned with
what I'm putting in my body every day. And so if I'm going to be smoking every day, I
want it to be something that I can at least tell myself, Hey, this is less likely to cause
a health problem in the future. We all have one body we've got to live in. And as we get
older, it becomes really real that we may have some health challenges in the future.
And that's crippling. I mean, life's great, right? You can have your bills paid and everything,
but the health issue doesn't really matter. So I started smoking a lot of outdoor to soil
grown and I noticed, you know, I was running every day at the time and I felt like I could
just puff and run and it just wasn't really a problem. But if I was smoking some indoor
hydro and at that particular point in time, I felt like maybe this is harsher, maybe this
is a problem. And so that started my trip into organics. Now I won't say that, you know,
smoking combustible in your lungs is something that's ever going to be perfectly smooth and
good for you. So I respect, you know, people looking at other methods, drinking tea, or
I definitely like edibles. But I think a lot of us, we feel similarly that like smoking
gives you this dose control where, yeah, you might have 10, 15 minutes to kind of like,
okay, well, don't ask me to do something for a few minutes, but then I'm good to go. Where
edibles is the opposite. It's like, you don't really know. And then in an hour, you know,
maybe it was not enough or maybe it's too much. And so edibles can be very interesting in
that regards. So you should take like an oil I'd make from olive oil every morning, but
less often lately.
Yeah. I think the, uh, the herb smoking, it's a lot easier to control the consumption edibles.
It all has a lot that has more variables. It has, if you got food in your stomach, if
you don't have food in your stomach, if you're drinking caffeine or not, it just has more
variables when you're eating it than it does when you're smoking it. And it's a lot faster
to smoke it.
Yeah. It has no ceiling either. So like, if you end up, obviously it's easy to control.
You just eat that normal amount of edibles, but if you're not making them, or maybe just
a buddy gift into you to know what the strength is, it's one of those things that you can
overdo and it doesn't really have a ceiling. Like it can just keep going where when you
smoke, I mean, at a certain point, it's not going to do any of them. You can just smoke
and smoke and smoke and smoke and smoke and smoke, uh, but edibles can get a little weird.
They take the urge off of wanting to smoke too. Is that a mouth, uh, fixation you stop
that even with cigarettes. I've never given some people with some edibles and they're
like, Oh man, I'm going four hours about smoking a cigarette. They just didn't have the urge
to want to do that.
Yeah. I think microdosing, a lot of people have been talking about micro dosing characteristics
and helping people that are quitting something. Um, I don't know, you know, but it does seem
that microdosing, that's something else I do occasionally psilocybin where some weeks
I will, some months I won't, but it's one of those things that is like that. You can
kind of bring it into your life as opposed to having to be dependent upon it. So exactly.
I have, I've tried the same. It's been readily available since it's been legalized here and
even the year before that. So it's easy and there's a lot of people not afraid to talk
about it. So a 0.2 gram, a milligram micro dose in the morning. It's kind of like an
edible. Definitely calms the nerves, keeps you from being in a hurry and a rush. It definitely
helps me concentrate and think a little clearer. It re networks the wiring in your brain somehow.
Definitely. I feel like even a very small one, a lot of times there's more positivity,
a little more smiling, a little bit more like focused thought without the anxiety, but our
minds are complex, man. It's like being human is a lot to it.
There's some people that are micro dosing the edibles. I mean, I can't do it. My edible
consumption is a little higher because I've been consuming for 30 years, but just getting
into cannabis barely makes it like five milligram edible, a little CBD one to one. Oh man, it
hits some people just right. And it really does help some people calm down. After consuming
for a while, your tolerance does get up. Yeah, it totally does. I mean, I remember when
I was younger, a lot of my friends would be like, yeah, man, I'm taking a tolerance break.
Just that way their herb would be stronger again. And I'm like, fuck that. I don't want
to take a break. I switch up the method. I've found out and
listened to some other podcasts, smoking all, I don't know if you've heard of the girls
over at smoking all and Andy, they have a podcast and they're, they're PhD scientists
and they do a lot of research and they're studying the effects of consuming in different
ways. So you smoke it out of a bowl. The temperature is just a little bit different than it is
smoking out of a bung. Yup. Getting out of a joint, smoking out of a blunt. So if you
switch it up, I've noticed smoking blunts and bongs for a month and then I'll smoke
a bowl of the same weed. And I'm like, Oh man, it just hit a little different.
Yep. No, I concur. I think switching varieties and then switching methodologies. And I even
noticed early on when I first started smoking, like you'd be hanging out in your house where
your, your mind knows where everything's at, where your couch is, where your kitchen's
at and you're hanging and you smoke. And it's one thing, but all of a sudden you go to somebody's
house, never been to out of a piece you've never smoked out of it. It's going to be your
same herb. And all of a sudden you're like, woo, totally another level of head change.
And a lot of us have experienced that kind of like drinking at the bar. You step off
the bar. So you're like, Whoa, okay. Maybe I had more, one more drink than I thought.
Same thing. Occasionally that'll happen is you'll be on a weekend, just in your own zone,
crushing stuff off of your to-do list, you know, be smoking and then you'll head into
town or something. You're like, Oh, Hey everybody. I'm a little bit more high than I thought.
Who are these people? Just that have you ever had an experience when you over-consumed or
you felt uneasy or like, Oh, I'm going to die. And you want to call the hospital or
have you ever been around anybody that's been in that situation? No, I've had some issues
where I was uneasy when I first started. And I'll bring up a story that I think is kind
of funny, but I've never really been around anybody that's had that happen. I can imagine
with edibles and you know, the newer generation, a lot more access, there could be some crazy
experiences. But you know, I always knew what I was getting myself into. My friends were
either more older than me or whatever the case was where that wasn't likely. I did,
I remember when I first started smoking, my roommate at the time, he had this like three
foot blue bong. And I remember that I would smoke kind of like a quarter bowl or like
a little half snap out of it. And we were getting ready to go to the movies. And I was
like, fucking, I'm just going to like smoke an entire bowl to myself, you know. And at
that time, it was like, we just smoked a little personals. And that was like the big thing
instead of trying to share it all, you know, and you get in half, you just smoke a little
personal. So I packed a brimmer and I didn't have very much tolerance at all. I was just
kind of venturing further than I had before. And I remember like, barely being able to
walk through this outdoor mall, get to the movies. And I don't remember even the opening
scene. I just remember waking up with the credits just completely passed out. And then
I was fine afterwards, but walking there, I will never forget like, oh my God, how do
I buy the ticket? People are looking at me just kind of that feeling, right? Just too
much. Since then, that's never happened again from smoking. I just think that that was,
you know, an increase in tolerance and was fairly early on in my smoking career, so to
speak.
I think that's a common thing where newbies or people just starting to smoke. I remember
in high school smoking and man, everybody knows I'm stoned. Everybody's staring at
me. I remember walking through the fairgrounds with a couple of friends, just like, oh man,
everybody is staring at us. But nobody was. It was just all in your brain.
I think that's a good lesson for life too. I think as a kid, a lot of times with even
about smoke, you start thinking people care and wondering and they're judging me and all
these things, right? That exists out there. And sometimes cannabis can bring that anxiety
level up if you're super high and now you're in a situation where you're not really sure.
And then you add that back in the day, the law and the fear of someone knowing what's
going on, you know?
And that still exists in a lot of states.
It does, believe me, you know, but just in my reality, right? And so, yeah, definitely.
And then edibles, I've had some times where it's just taken me a lot further than I anticipated
for a lot more hours than anticipated. And it was fine. It was nothing like over the
edge, but I've just definitely had some experiences. And I've had a couple of times where you just
wake up, you know, falling asleep, eating too many edibles. And you're like, holy shit,
am I doing the right thing with my life? What's going on with my whole world? And a little
bit of those like rushing thoughts coming. But yeah, I think that's what you get a little
older and the responsibility sits in. Maybe you got a kid or something and then you're
like, oh, you're really thinking more about that responsibility and what I'm doing with
my life. I think it happens when you're about 26 to 28. I mean, that's when your brain fully
develops as a human.
Well, and it's important, right? I mean, if you don't question whether what you're doing
is wrong or right, you can be left on the wrong path for too long. And a lot of people
do that. And cannabis helps us think about things, but it doesn't always help us make
decisions. At the end of the day, you've got to just do personal development and think
about what you want in your life.
I think the psilocybin does that too. It actually helps you think about it, but actually put
it in motion instead of just thinking about it and like, yeah, I need to quit coffee.
I need to quit smoking cigarettes, but then you do this. You just keep doing it. So psilocybin
will help you to focus on what you need to do and actually set it in motion.
Yep. And I think gardening teaches a lot of that too. You know, when you're growing a
plant and you realize you can't skip a couple of days just because and there's consequences
to it starts to shape up the discipline in your life. And a lot of times we know what
we want. It's weird. We have two parts of the brain. And it's funny. My dad used to
tell me growing up, Hey, you always listen to your little voice. Most important thing
I can teach you. But I joke, I joke with him saying, Hey, you never told me that there
was two fucking voices. And there's one that's kind of like your inner little bitch or you're
in a little weakness. That's like trying to, it just knows all of your insecurities. It
knows like, Hey, you should just sleep in. Hey, you don't want to do that last set at
the gym or all that last bit of work. It's late in the day. Just do it tomorrow. And
there's the other set that reminds you of your goals. And if you start to listen to
one more than the other, I think you can train it. And I've gone through phases of my life
where like success has bred the weaker voice. Like, Hey, you've earned it. You can take
some time off. And I've also had times in my life where I'm like, I just want to be
savage. Like I just want to do everything that I say I'm going to do and know that I'm
getting closer to my goals. And so I think it's important to know both those voices exist
in our brain. And if we're only listening to one of them explicitly, maybe we're going
down the wrong path. They're both there for a reason. You know, the one doesn't want you
to waste energy. The other one doesn't want you to waste opportunity. You get too far
down one side. And it can be a problem. And I think that a lot of times smoking cannabis,
just being able to think about these things in the chaos that day to day life make a huge,
huge difference. But other times, just like a cup of coffee, like I said, you're just
doing it to maintain normalcy. So,
So you came to Colorado, you started up build a soil. What was the, the push behind that?
What you said you wanted the healthiest? I think that's a big thing with a lot of cannabis
users. They want to put the healthy thing they can in their body. That's once you start
doing that with cannabis, you start doing it with your plant, you see how it affects
your plants really quickly. And then you put that correlation into your own body, which
is a little bit slower, but it's, it's there. If you don't use yourself enough water, you
start to wrinkle up and you start to get wrinkles in your face. You drink more water, your bags
under your eyes starting to go away. I know I've drank water for six months with nothing
else. The bags under your eyes go away. Your skin becomes clearer. You lose weight.
Yes.
Not just water.
A lot of these you see in the garden, because it's a shorter timeline. Like you said, you
can see an entire life process in a few months and you realize, wow, one deficiency or lack
of attention and you'd start to lose a lot of health and the leaves start to fade and
issues happen. And it's hard not to correlate that to your own life. I wonder if some of
these lack of nutrition, maybe what is a day in a plant life is several years for us, but
there's certainly correlation. If you just go on a binge of staying up too late, not
getting up on time, being rushed in the mind, eating fast food, drinking all the time, your
body is going to show it like a plant who's not being tamed properly. And the good news
is any of us that have grown plants, once we make that decision to change and be disciplined,
you can nurse a plant around from unhealth back to full raging health and take off again.
The trick is not to stop the discipline once it's healthy again. And I think that's part
of life as well, is just sticking to it in a consistent day-to-day fashion. And it's
a lesson I'm not trying to preach. I'm more sharing struggles that I have while human.
Exactly. And so I'm not perfect by any means, but I'm aware of that. And that's part of
what keeps me on the path. That's why I'm trying to get the message out there so people
can see how cannabis consumers use cannabis on a regular basis to help their lives and
they can assimilate and stop these bad things that they're doing. I quit drinking maybe
eight, seven years ago. I drank way too much and cannabis really helped me.
Well, for me too, I'm athletic. Like I do jujitsu at least three days a week. I'd like
to go four or five if schedule allows. And I noticed that if I have a glass of wine or
two the night before, my wedding ring, it won't quite fit right. I can't take it off
that easily. And that's an indication of some of the inflammation. And when I start to grapple,
I'll notice that maybe I'm just not quite as flexible. And that leads to more residual
pain and stuff because I'm getting older and grappling is not that easy on the body. And
so really when I was in college, I would look around and I'd go to parties and I realized
that man, the designated drinker or the designated driver, designated drinker, the DD, the designated
driver, we'd all like pick, okay, it's your turn. To me, that was the person playing Russian
roulette with all of our lives that night. They weren't going to not drink once they
got to the party. They were just going to be the one taking all the risks that night
by driving the car. And I thought, I cannot do this. I'm just going to drive myself and
I'll smoke. And two things would happen. One, maybe I'd tell myself I'd have a drink just
so I could be mingling at the party and I'd start smoking as well. And I'd be like, yeah,
the circle, everybody's outside. We're passing the joint around or whatever. Then I'd be
like, fuck, where's my drink? I don't know, man. Like, and so it kept me from drinking.
And I really do think that drinking is significantly more problematic for life. It's a great time.
Don't get me wrong. I mean, having a few drinks when I was younger and being a lot more social
helps lubricate the mind and just not give a fuck and have a lot more fun. But DUI, several
of my friends had multiple DUIs and really ruined their life over it. And I would see
that. And it's not like they didn't smoke either. To me, I just kind of gravitated towards
cannabis as, hey, if we're all going to recreate, we're all going to drink, we're all going
to have some fun, let loose. This one seems to not affect my athletic life. It seems to
not affect, like I don't have a hangover in the morning. Maybe I could argue that if I
smoke like a whole bunch right before I'm about to fall asleep, getting up is slightly
harder, but it seems more to be like a mental desire as opposed to like I'm physically just
hung over or whatever. So it's just more forgiving across the board for me.
Yeah, I think a lot of athletes use it too. It helps them to recover because it relaxes
their muscles. It helps their muscles to recuperate quicker after lifting weights. A lot of bodybuilders,
Arnold Schwarzenegger, it's known fact that Michael Phelps, a lot of athletes use it to
de-sit, just to relax. And their muscles do work better. I think it is actually an enhancing
drug. It helps people to perform better.
It's interesting because a lot of these athletes like Hinchujitsu steroids is just overused.
It's ridiculous because it's not as professional of a sport with all the testing. And a lot
of these athletes are like, yes, CBD droppers and they're advertising. And you're like,
bro, you took like 10 injections of steroids this morning. I think your recovery is probably
going to be fine. But as average athletes, it's like, you need to take every little bit
you can get. I've got this Tiger's Blood CBD cream or a balm that Tumix, TSK is a breeder
as well. But I've just used it for like the last six, seven years. It's one of my favorite
products and it really helps if I have a muscle injury.
I like the CBD too. CBD actually helps you if you overconsume too much THC, you can fix
a little CBD. It'll help to calm you down and take the effects away from the THC. So
I do that when I'm out and partying and there's recreational smoking blunts and so much smoke
around and you start to get a little, I'll take some CBD. It helps to bring me back a
little bit instead of being so tired. So your soil, was that the first product that you
started to develop when you came to Colorado? Was it soil or was it nutrients? Were you
more focused on outdoor? Because I know you said the outdoor and the indoor. I'd actually
read a nice little review that came out, a journal paper about a week ago about outdoor
and indoors, that same strain grown side by side.
I didn't think it was a good study on my initial review. I wanted to.
The sesquiterpenes or something like that.
Yeah, but the challenges is in that study, they said it was a proprietary soil mix of
organic matter, whatever, probably just a living soil. And then also some proprietary
indoor. I'm like, can't we just do living soil indoor and outdoor? So we see if there's
a correlative difference. I almost think it was like a hydro versus soil study. But since
you split it with two variables, one hydro, one soil, and then one outdoors, one indoors,
it kind of blew me away. They're talking about the degradation and oxidation of the indoor
of some of the cannabinoids were outdoors. You had a lot more nuances and different cannabinoids
that were created. I think anybody that's grown the same genetic indoors and outdoors,
they notice there's something special about the outdoor, the sun, the environment. It
creates a really warm, well-connected like glow. It feels good when you smoke outdoor.
And I think that's part of it.
There's a warm fuzzy body feeling.
Yeah, obviously dirt, bugs, all the other stuff. It's not like indoors perfect, but
there's this trade-off. And so I think that a lot of us that are growing in the living
soil, we've noticed this connection and we're hoping to bring as much of that to our indoor
garden as possible. And although I love the study, that's kind of what I was frustrated
with. It was like, man, I wonder if the living soil indoor had as many of the benefits as
the outdoor grown living soil in comparison to the hydro. But most of us have understood
that if you're growing in straight hydro without the benefits of some organic additives, a
lot of times the terpene level and the cannabinoid profile is much more narrowed and we don't
like it as much. And these are nuanced things. And so a lot more experienced growers that
have that internal judgment from batch to batch, smoke to smoke and have experience,
they tend to guide towards some preference. And when you're growing your own, you should
just grow the way you want. So it makes sense to me.
Soil was not the first product that we made. Build a soil was originally designed to help
others build their own soil. And what I didn't expect is to people to say, well, I don't
care what's in it, just tell me what to make. And I just want it to work. And so originally
I was like, well, we'll put anything you want. We'll put this, we'll put that, we'll make
with this compost. And most people were saying, look, I don't know what to choose on this
list. Can you just make the best soil ever for cannabis? And I was hesitant because early
on I realized cannabis is an annual flowering plant. While we feel it's very special and
it is, it's not special in that regard. You know, you can just grow a regular plant and
as long as that grows healthy, then that's going to work for cannabis as well. And I
remember in the beginning, a lot of people were like, yeah, but this genetic, it likes
a higher level of calcium in the soil. And if you add this, then that particular strain
will do. And I mean, maybe there's some nuance there, but realistically we're talking about
thousand variables of environmental differences from which type of grow light outdoor, indoor,
all these things that could change. And so I was kind of hesitant, but we eventually
started making soil on a tarp in my garage and people would say, Hey, can you just make
me like three or four yards of this? And I'd be out there with a shovel, getting the ingredients
together, mixing it, and they'd come pick it up, drive over, get it in trash bags in
the back of their truck, whatever it took. And eventually that turned into us wanting
to have somebody that could do it instead of me, because I was running the business
and I can only do a couple of batches every once in a while. And so we brought an employee
in or a couple of them. Oh, sorry about that. And they would basically just make the soil
in a big feeding trough, like a, almost like rowing a boat. It was, you know, 10, 12 feet
long and it was rectangular and fairly narrow. So you kind of sit on the edge and you can
use a shovel and you can shovel one way and you can get on the other side and move all
the soil back. And that was our way of just getting it all mixed together. And eventually
that led to looking at some batch soil mixing machine, but living soil, the way that we
saw that it was taught, it included 20 to 35% compost, like lots of compost. And then
on top of that, almost a hundred pounds of rock dust and then pumice and lava rock and
heavy things. So we'd get our first soil mixer. We loaded up, it was supposed to be like a
one yard soil mixer. We could mix like a half yard in it because it would just seize the
whole motor up, break the machine if we tried to do it. And so we realized, hey, this might
be harder for other people to do. Maybe we could have a way to make us a living soil.
And eventually soil testing got involved. And that's where we really learned enough
to make a duplicatable, consistent product because, you know, you sell a couple of truck
loads of soil and then you have to find a different compost or you have to get enough
rock dust and then, you know, we're talking organics. So they're slightly different. It's
not like the same exact chemical each time. So to do that, we had to learn more. And at
each step of the way, we've not been scared of that. We've just learned more, dug in,
gotten better and gone further. And now we have a whole soil building indoors here in
Colorado with a pretty sophisticated machinery line that you fill all the hoppers with the
different ingredients and it drops them into like a, like a cake that goes down a conveyor
and it puts water on it and it goes through a mixing head. And one of the other big challenges
that kept us from making this early, early on was, was really the fact that it took several
weeks to cook afterwards. So like our 3.0 recipe, it takes almost three weeks. It's
crazy. So did you start with the light weight? I know. So we were making only the Clackamas
toot recipe in the beginning. We made the LoS Ollie and the LoS Malibu, the living organic
soil. And that was basically the exact recipes we got off the forum. That was one third compost,
one third peat moss and one third aeration. We use pumice and rice holes. We mix all that
together with kelp and neem and crustacean and basalt and gypsum and all the standard
ingredients. And that was our first offering. It worked really well. And that one, you didn't
have to cook as much. What year was that? So 2013, 2014. Yeah.
So 10 years ago. It was about six years ago. I went around on
a spree trying to find living soil. That's about when I got into living soil and I could
not find a bag of living soil on the shelf, pre-made six years ago here in Denver or in
the high country. Yeah. And so super soil was popular when I
first started this and there was like a green Avengers soil that came out, but you know,
just whipping a whole bunch of stuff in a soil is different than making it at your house.
And a lot of people would have problems with copious amounts of nutrients being mixed into
a super soil and not everyone understanding how to layer it and all these challenges.
That's part of what gravitated a lot of the forums into the living soil style was we were
like, doesn't nature put the heavy food on top, not in the bottom? And isn't there a
better way to go about doing this? But so many of the original recipes were a laundry
list of items that you could buy at any garden center and then dump them all in a pile. And
so it served its purpose. If you were not able to talk about this, you got some secret
list online. You could go to ace hardware, go to the local garden store, go to the big
box store, buy some castings, buy some, you know, Mike or eyes. I, if they had it buy
a whole bunch of different things and mix it in a pile. And so those original recipes,
they started being based off of a bag potting soil as the base. And so you wouldn't just
go by peat moss and aeration. You would buy like roots, organics or Fox farm or whatever.
And you would dump that in the pile and then you'd soup that up. I think that led to some
problems because not every bag of potting soil was the same. Then you'd add a whole
bunch of stuff to it. It was kind of like going to the store and buying a whole bunch
of canned soup and then mixing them all together and then adding the meat and saying that you're
a chef. And so eventually when it comes down to it, now all the soil companies, none of
them buy, I mean, maybe they are, but the few living soil companies that have come out
of the woodwork, they're not just buying somebody else's soil and mixing stuff into it. That's
what was done because of the hole in the market. And so now we sell like a take a big kit where
you can get all the stuff to your house and you can open up the raw peat moss, break it
up with your hands, put the compost in and really go through that experience. And while
I love that we have bag potting soil, it's great, but we mix it here. We put it in a
bag. It sits there until it gets to you. Something about taking the raw ingredients, understanding
the ratio, breaking it up with your own two hands, moistening yourself, seeing it come
to life and warm up and all the biology that's involved and tending to it every day while
you're getting excited to plant into it. I feel that really connects people to the original
emotions that we had when we were starting to build our own soil or build a soil. So
I really encourage a lot of our customers to look at those kits. You can buy some compost.
There's some nutrients from us. You can go get the peat moss locally. There's a million
ways to do this. When I first started, a lot of us were going up like into the national
forest and getting a little leaf litter from under a tree here, some rock dust there and
putting it in our soil pile. But as build a soil, I'm hesitant to tell everybody from
every city, just drive to every nature and start digging it up. So I do like that our
soil works great out of the bag. Building it yourself is really exciting.
So when you say cook, what exactly do you mean by cooking it?
Yep. So it's basically composting, homogenizing, coming together. We have a lot of biology
and so when you mix a big soil pile together, a lot of these amendments are powdered and
they're just dried up, ground up organic inputs like chopped up seeds would be a seed meal.
Alfalfa is just the alfalfa all chopped up and dried. And so when you add those to the
soil, it's not like there's nutrients in the soil. There's just ground up organic matter.
That organic matter kind of has to go through a biological breakdown process. And when you
make the soil and you add lots of stuff, it can start to create ammonia and all these other
problems and actually heat up. And there's thermophilic bacteria in there that as they
consume, they create waste and they start to breathe, consume oxygen. And so it can
make it get warm and it can make it so your plants can't really breathe. And what's interesting
is the original like Coot's recipe, it didn't have like the crustacean meal is more of a
calcium source, the neem cakes, the seed meal, but that actually has some inhibiting effects
to ammonium in the nitrogen process. If you research neem, some people think it's a problem.
I think it's a benefit. But that's part of why the Coot's mix, you never had to cook.
You just mix it and plant into it. Still, if you waited a week or so, it seemed to be
more forgiving. But the super soil, if you didn't wait, I mean, your plants would fry
because realistically, if you put a super soil in a three by three pile, so it's a cubic
yard three by three by three, when you learn about composting, what you find is that you
can't just jump dump some kitchen scraps in a pile and expect compost. You can dump kitchen
scraps in a pile for a couple of years and eventually the biology and everything turns
it into compost through slow composting. But most thermophilic compost that we're used
to the high quality stuff, it's made over a couple of months period and it's done by
adding the right amount of carbons and the right amount of nitrogen for Browns and greens.
When you learn the ratios and you just say a layer of Browns, layer of greens, layer
of Browns, layer of greens, then you have to turn it every day because when you get
it right and you get the moisture right, it goes up to almost 160 degrees. And compost
makers, they know it'll go past 160 if they don't turn it. And that can actually start
to ruin the compost where in that 120 to 160, it's in that like composting phase, actively
composting. And so if you keep turning it where the outside that's not as biological
gets mixed to the inside of the engine in that three by three by three pile, that's
the minimum size. So if you were to just stack Browns and greens in a five gallon bucket
and set it there, nothing would happen. It's something about the volume in nature that
creates enough of this reaction that it starts to really heat up. And so when we mix soil
together, super soil with all those carbon inputs that are organic nutrients, and some
of them high nitrogen, you're now getting carbons and nitrogens in a potting soil and
you start to basically compost right there in the pile. And so they call it cooking because
it'll actually get hot. But what's interesting is, you may not notice that in a five gallon
bucket, it can just be off. And what I mean by that is in a three by three by three, if
you were to build a cubic yard of super soil, it'll get 150 degrees. But if you just make
like a 10 gallon batch, it's not enough volume and it may just get mildly warm and it may
take a long time to go through that process. And I've noticed that if you just plant a
plant right into a pretty good rich mix without cooking it, it'll just act like it's out
of air, even though it's not over water and it'll get burned because it's actually getting
hot around the root zone. And really what I think is happening if the heat's not excessive
is it's not physically burning it with heat. It's the soil is still kind of cooking or
homogenizing is composting, which means that the microbes are eating first. They're one
of town they're turning all that into food, but it's not food yet. And so your plant is
kind of like just hanging out waiting for the soil to become soil. And whether you have
to cook or not, we know that if you wait more time, whether it needed it or not, it's probably
more together, more balanced and moisture and the biology is proliferated and it's ready
to go. So it's part of the build a soil way. If you're going to make your own soil, we
recommend giving it a week or two before you plant into it. Then you're going to have really
good experience.
Yeah. A lot of people don't know that I've had some bad experience by pre prepped super
soil burned up a lot of roots. You can see it just leaves look burned. They start to
turn brown and crisp and crispy and, and a nutrient burn. It's
Yeah. So like our build a soil light, we can make right off the line and put it right into
a bag. It's great. The balance is so ideal that we're not going to go thermal, really
finished compost in it. But in 3.0, we have multiple compost sources and a lot more organic
inputs. And so if we run that off the line into a cubic foot bag, it'll actually perform
okay. But if someone dumps 20 of those cubic footers into a pile, like for a big bed of
soil, it'll get hot. And so that's, you know, one of the natures of the beast is I think
that people that are growing this way should just be aware of these things. So they don't
ruin their own crop. But what we do to offset that, if we run the 3.0 into big yard tote
sacks and we let it sit in that cubic yard sack until it's finished getting warm and
we measure temperature. At that point, we dump it back in the hopper, run it through
the bagging machine. So it's already cooked before we bag it. That's a huge issue. I mean,
to buy a truckload of compost, truckload of peat moss in the middle of winter, have it
show up, have it processed, have it made into soil, have it sit there for three weeks, have
it re-bagged and allocate which one of those are the finished product when somebody wants
it today. You know, it's a lot of logistics and value to be adding to a pot of soil that
most people think is worthless. It's like, well, it's dirt. I mean, can I buy it for
like five bucks? You're like, dude, I had to have an entire business just to funnel
all these things and a whole bunch of money to pay for all these, then mix it together,
then cook it, then put it in. So building your own takes all that risk out and allows
you to go through that process yourself. And I think you really see the value in it at
that point.
So, I have a couple of clients that I consult. They love building soil. And when I get a
new client, I've already explained it to them, but I wanted you to spit it out. What type
of soil do you recommend for germinating seeds?
Okay, this is a good question. And this is one that's challenging for me to answer because
I never want to hurt someone, right? I never want to tell them to do something and have
them have a bad result. But I can pop seeds right now 3.0 or light soil. I actually really
like using build a soil light to start seeds. It's one of my favorites.
I've done the 3.0.
It works, right? But if you lose one seed and they're expensive, you're like, I wonder
if it was the soil and putting the seeds in a very biologically rich soil. You know, you
might have one that was the weak seed that may have been very weak and it gets eaten
by something that's living in the soil because a little moist gets in there. So it's possible.
And that's why a lot of people like in bulk commercial operations, they always sterilize
everything so they don't lose a million dollars of seeds. But for us home growers, I mean,
man, everybody's
Especially a breeder. You don't want that weak one. So I like it. It actually, I like
that. I want the strong genetic seeds. Just pop it straight in soil. You're buying seeds
and spending a large part of your budget. That's where you get people using like paper
towels and every method possible. I prefer to go right to soil and have some faith. We
do offer what's called our heady starts seedling soil. And that one we made just because a
lot of times if you're starting vegetable seeds or things, you need to have a flat with
a like 72 or 100 little tiny little seedling holes in it and you need to put a whole bunch
of seed in there. And so this is a pro mix. And then we add in some worm castings and
we add in some Montana grow volcanic rock dust. And we put in a little bit of nutrients
that has this phosphorus that really helps the rooting. And it works great. It holds
a little more water than I like, but that's good if you just set it and forget it. And
it works really well. I've had phenomenal success using that with large seed runs where
I got a very high percentage of germination. But at my house, is it a little sorry, sorry
about that. It's a little less hydrophobic. Like does it? Yeah, it absorbs the water immediately.
All living soil is a little hydrophobic. So that's one thing when you water it, it likes
to go right to the bottom. Once it's balanced, the soil will absorb water properly. But all
fresh living soils, we're not adding a chemical wetting agent like these potting soil companies.
And so even if we add a wetting agent, it breaks down, it's not going to be active anymore.
That's kind of just for the initial wedding. But a chemical one can persist. And so it
can have the ideal qualities to receive water right away where any living soil, you know,
we've experimented a lot around here. If we put too much water in the soil, then it costs
the customer a lot in freight just to ship the water. If we make it too dry, then when
they get it, they can't get it wet. They just keep putting water on it. Unless you actually
get your hands in there, it's hard to get it to absorb. Once it's absorbed, it's fine.
So for us, from a quality control perspective, it's ideal to have the moisture perfect and
then put it into a bag where it's likely to preserve that. But we have to have little
micro holes in the bags because we don't want it to go anaerobic, be sealed in an enclosed
environment. So for what it's worth, those that are gardening at home, if they buy a
bag of potting soil, one of the first things they should do is make sure they address the
moisture. If you just take a bone dry bag and throw a plant into it, it may never receive
the water properly and have dry pockets. If you just take a bag and it feels super wet
and just dump water straight into it, it might hold a decent amount of water. And that's
the one big learning curve, I think, with living soil is understanding that. And all
of the nutrient cycling is dependent upon. You drown them in water, they won't get it.
You don't give them enough. It's almost a hot soil because there's barely any water
with the available nutrients.
Yeah, I'll pour some in the bag, let it sit for a little bit. Then I'll mix it up, make
sure it's nice and moist before you can even like fold the bag back down and shake it around
a little bit. I'll just flip it upside down and keep turning it. So if there's any water
selling at the bottom, it'll just go right back to the top.
And that's part of what I think I like in the Build a Soil way we explain, hey, get
your container built, get it moist and nice, get it in the environment so it's like warm,
not ice cold. A lot of times we'll sprout a little cover crop in it so some roots get
in there. But when you do that, you're also taking care of the moisture issue by nature
just because you're giving yourself time where it's not an emergency. You're like watering
it slowly, checking on it. But if you just take a bone dry bag of soil and you have to
get transplanted that minute, it may be a couple of days of getting the moisture right,
but it'll still work. So yeah, I like the idea of getting it ready.
Let the microbes get warm, get them nice and alive, get them some moisture so they can
start working and then put the plant in. Yeah, like when I make bread, Koot, the Clackamas
Koot, he taught a lot of the original recipes and had he just had so much good information
as to why these things worked. But he baked a lot of bread. And so he would correlate
some of his understanding of yeast, single cell, real simple fungi, and how that might
correlate to the soil. And it's crazy. You take your starter for sourdough, you add a
little tiny bit of sourdough starter, whole bunch of flour and some water and set it there.
And by the end of the day, it's fully expanded. And it's a big starter to the point where
it's going to run out of food now. So you got to feed it again every day, sometimes
twice a day. It just depends on temperatures, all these things. So you start to think about
that. You're like, huh, my soil is alive, add a little water, get it the right temperature.
Will that ramp up like my sourdough starter did and be ready and teaming with life? I
think so. And when you see how quickly that can happen, it makes sense that we don't need
to be perfect. We just need to get the ideal conditions that nature kind of takes over.
So you start off with the what was the name of the seed starter mix again?
Okay, so the seed starter mix is our heady starts.
Okay, so you start with that. I usually leave mine in the container two to three weeks,
depending on how fast they are. And then you transplant them transplanted them into the
lightweight or 3.0. Correct? Those are the two other ones.
I like the light or the 3.0 depends on what my goals are.
So is the 3.0 something that you can put in a seven gallon bucket one plant and it will
carry it through the whole lifecycle? Or do you have to amend?
For the most part? Yes, we build a soil we really shy away from saying water only. And
what I mean by that is most people that I give that freedom to, they end up growing
which what's going to be like a half pound plant out of a seven gallon pot, it won't
sustain life to the end. But if you put a plant in our goal is to have a canopy that
mimics the size. So if you have one seven gallon in a four by four, and you vege it
for six weeks, scrogging it out, and then you flip the flower, there's no way the seven
gallon of 3.0 is going to support that. It's just too much biomass being taken out of the
container. But as far as going further than light and other soil recipes that are balanced,
yes, it has a lot more slow release in it that will continue to keep up with the plant.
And so a lot of people end up getting the 3.0 because they put that in a container,
they flip the flower on time, and they can run water only and they really, really like
it. Myself with 3.0 or with light, any of them, I like to use a larger container and
start to set up that top dress layer where the feeder roots can go up. And they can eventually
get used to the food being on the top of the soil, not everywhere. And so the 3.0, I really
like it. It makes sense for a ton of reasons. The light soil, I think, gives people the
most flexibility in that their plants are perfectly healthy out of the light soil no
matter what, because it's not overdone for some genetics. And then they can add a little
bit to it. But some people, they're like, I don't want to, I don't know if I want to
add and deal with all that. So just give me the 3.0. And at least it's done at the lab
with some balance where they're going to have good results for how much is in there. But
we like almost triple up the nutrients in there. And so in the light soil, you get a
lot more balance as far as immediately out the gate. Most every genetic should just be
very, very healthy. The whole leaf should be perfect. And that's really what I'm looking
for. You can do it with both. But I feel like a lot of our customers that go to 3.0, they
just want the best. They want it loaded. They don't want to worry about it. And a lot of
our customers that go with light, they go, oh, I immediately want to put some teas on
and top dress. And I'm worried about overdoing it if I get the 3.0. So I hope that makes
sense. Like a lot of us are coming from hydro. We just want to tinker every day.
A lot of people like to put stuff in and they like to. And so you would get the 3.0 and
you start putting stuff in it every day. You know, you could overdo it. So, so, um, if
you do get the light, what are some products that you like to use with your, with your
soil? I know that you have root wise. I've seen you got down to Canna Con, talked to
Martin and uh, uh, miles from fermented plant extracts. You guys were all kind of together
there. And, uh, so do you, uh, you use the root wise? I've, uh, actually used the, uh,
biofoss root wise, which helped unlock the phosphorus. Correct. Yep. And there's other
reasons there's, there's definitely a whole plethora of organisms in that biofoss and
a lot of them are enzyme producers. And so a lot of the organic nutrients, they're going
to be broken down through an enzymatic process. And so the biology is important because they're
going to produce the enzymes to start the breakdown specific to that compound. Um, having
heavy enzyme producing bacteria makes a big sense, a lot of sense as well. And these will
sometimes correlate in that functional group where some of them are creating more enzymes
to make it easier for the other ones to jump in. And it's like a family, there's different
biology for each job. Like one biological function might break down the original ammonium
to nitrate. Another one might come in and release the phosphorus. And so when you go
to the hydro store, a lot of times you'll see this broken down in a different products.
You can buy the mycorrhizae, which is the fungi, and that's on healthy farms. And we
see them either go around the root or in the root, depending on the type. And so cannabis
prefers the mycorrhizal, um, there's endo or there's Ecto, right? So you look on the
bag of the mycorrhizae that you get in the root was those, the species that we're looking
for, for annual flowering plants, where if you get an endo Ecto, that's like for the
whole garden, it's for trees and it's also for annuals. And you, it's just kind of trying
to please everybody. And so early on I would pull up like Great White, all these other
companies and they were just clearly bought like a gardening product and try to make a
cannabis label because it's everything. It's not just for cannabis. It's almost a waste
of money to buy stuff for a fruit tree that won't work at all with cannabis. Then you
realize, yeah, these scientists may not have it perfect. There's not one type of fungi
that works one way. Nature's not like that. So having a blend is good. A lot of these
will help with moisture, they'll help with disease and some of them will connect to the
plant, help them take up nutrients. And so the mycorrhizae is kind of the key one that
we've all learned about, teeming with microbes, a lot of these other books made popular. But
there's also Azos or Azospirillum and there's a number of different species. There's bacillus,
there's trichoderma. And if you just go buy trichoderma and you dump it on your plant,
but yesterday you'd put a regular biological product, they're not in the right balance.
So they can now consume each other because nature's like that. So in the root-wise, you
get the right amount of trichoderma, you get the right amount of the mycorrhizae. You also
get the Azos, which you normally have to buy as another product. Those nitrogen fixtures
are in there as part of that functional group. And so the root-wise product, the reason why
it's our flagship microbial product is it follows the build a soil method where you
actually have an entire functional group. And all of that is what's leading to the success
instead of pretending like we know this one biology is all you need. And a lot of products
are like two or three bacillus and that's it. And all they are is a new marketing fad
for a year or so. But when we look at the root-wise and we look at the way build a soil
does it, we represent like, I was talking to my staff today and they were referencing
some deficiency charts because a customer had asked. And I said, you throw those away.
That's like Western, that's like going to the doctor and saying, my knee hurts, as
opposed to telling them that you were just skydiving the other day and you hit the ground
hard. He's going to start giving you a pill when all you need is a little rest. And so
if we were to look at living soil, as far as the nutrient component, we don't want to
just be like, I think it's magnesium. We need to keep a buffet full and allow the plant
to take what it likes. It's important to know which things it likes more and you might have
to replenish sooner rather than later. But for the most part, as long as we don't have
excessive sodium, excessive chloride, excessive carbonates, we can add enough nutrients of
all types and let the plant decide and I'll have everything that it needs. That's why
Kraftland works well. That's why the loaded soils work well. But when you start picking
and choosing, you better be right because sometimes it's not, it's not what you're
seeing. It's an antagonism or an overwatering or something locking it out, not just the
ingredient. And so when we look at root wise, I'm not just like, oh, we just need a nitrogen
fixer or oh, this mycorrhizae is going to fix it. It's all of them combined so that
we can create healthy farm conditions in a potting soil. Now, arguably over time, you
have worms in there and decay and all these things going on. You may not need to continually
add any sort of microbial product, but you know, we're indoors, it's artificial light
and you overwater and I mentioned the sourdough thing to you. Like it's amazing how quickly
life can proliferate. And so it's nice to know that, hey, if you overwater one time,
maybe you can add some root wise and bring the balance back and adding them all in allows
to keep that buffet full as opposed to maybe the soil going one direction. And we get really
good results with it. When I first started carrying root wise, I was kind of hesitant.
I'm like, you don't need anything except for good soil, good genetics, good environment
and some discipline. But I noticed that a lot of our customers that have a wider margin
for success on the over under watering and all these other things, if they had some help
from really good biology. When we first started, it was all brewing compost tea. That's what
everyone did. And it's still a thing, but you can quickly see how brewing it incorrectly
or whatever it starts to spike biology in one direction. And Coot always used to make,
he's like, man, why are you brewing these compost teas? Just put the worm castings on
the soil. That's what I started doing. Yeah. And so our soil is similar. Like we have the
root wise. We love it. All three of those products that work really, really well. We
could spend hours just talking about those. The biodiversity in soil makes it just more
diversity makes it better. Like you said, the smaller sport, they can pick and choose
what they want. Yep. And then we have a 12 seed cover crop in permaculture. Having up
to 12 seeds gives you that diversity. So, you know, maybe one season, this seed does
better, maybe another one and it tracks bugs and pollinators and beneficials. So living
soil, this can give a home to a lot of your beneficial insects. And as you chop and drop
the cover crop into actual soil mulch that feeds the worms and it turns that decay into
new nutrients for your soil. So it never ever runs out of food and you keep the soil forever.
Before the living soil craze, people would literally be looking for places to secretly
dump all their soil after the run because it's illegal to grow and you didn't want to
put it out for the trash guy to find because he'd know you're growing. So you'd have to
drive around like behind Walmart or some shit, find a dumpster or like a creep or something.
And that's not good. You don't want people dumping stuff in the creek with chemical
nutrients. I just put in my regular garden. Yeah. It helped with my regular garden. Of
course. Of course. And then the other thing you do have a craft blend, you just mentioned
the craft blend. Is it a 13 or 12? I think it's 13. I think it's 13 ingredients. It might
be more. I was going to get one to talk about several in a row. I did get a bunch of diversity,
you know, and it's done in balance. And so what we did is you can actually get a free
report at Build a Soil on our blog. It's I think the most recent blog and it's a form.
But when you get the PDF, it explains the Steve Solomon way of making your own complete
organic fertilizer. You know, as a human, we know like, oh, let me make a healthy meal
tonight. I need like a protein, some salad, you know, a carb like, and you can have a
well balanced meal has long-term energy, short-term protein, all the stuff. But if you ask somebody
how to make a fertilizer for your plants, what do you add? What's the, what's the standard
balanced meal? And so that complete organic fertilizer tutorial teaches you via the Steve
Solomon method from his intelligent Gardner book of providing some seed meal, has a little
bit of everything, providing some calcium source, providing a phosphorus source. And
when you do that, you have a really great, well-rounded, complete organic fertilizer.
And we add rock dust to that for all the trace minerals. It's everything all in one.
It's a big blend also, right? Yeah. And Kraft Blend is just a version of that with a lot
of diversity, tons of different ingredients. So when you top dress it on your soil or mix
it in, you're feeding that biology, all these different ingredients. And we do have vegan
stuff, but a lot of times like what people don't realize is the soil in your backyard,
it has dead crustacean in it from previous eras. You know, a lake that used to be there.
Rabbit, rabbit turds. It's just rabbit, rabbit turds, worms, arthropods, all that. And to
compound it even further, like growing lettuce and taking those tractors on these big industrial
greens farms or berries or whatever, they're just slaughtering bunnies and homes of birds
and everything you can think of just while they're harvesting the greens. So I think
from a vegan perspective, growing your own is always a really good way to go. But I doubt
a vegan would want blood meal and bone meal growing their lettuce, especially when that
blood and bone comes from a slaughterhouse that has all the politics that they wouldn't
agree with. Being fed GMO corn through a political system that they'd rather vote out. And so
giving their grandparents cancer through all the chemicals. So when you fully connect
it, it's hard to see how they're, yeah, there's some emotion there. But vegan as far as soil
with all those politics aside, I don't think that's how you really build soil. But I do
agree with a lot of it in the sense that a seed meal is very forgiving and makes a lot
of sense. But a fish meal, I mean, if you're catching your own fish out here in Colorado,
there's a lot of mining, there might be lots of heavy metals in it. You have to be kind
of careful. You don't want just a million pounds of the same exact fish from the same
location where plant based is very safe. When we send off for heavy metal testing, very
little gets up into the plant seed meal versus the raw ocean based or animal based amendments.
But like bone meals, great, I would love to use it. There's just no organic bone meal
out there. They say it's for organic use, but it's from non organically fed cattle
from the big slaughterhouses. So build a soil doesn't use it. We use a fish bone meal because
it's wild caught fish. But, you know, at the end of the day, regular bone meal would be
a little bit better because of the lack of sodium that comes in it. But there just isn't
a clean source. Guano, similar, like we don't use guano. I don't want my employees breeding
it and there's other reasons but sustainability. And you can choose to use some of these, but
it's just knowing why. And I feel like build a soil's mission is to provide the burden
of the knowledge and allow the consumer to decide what they'd like to do as opposed to
just being sold some bullshit and being lied to. You know, you go to the store and a lot
of these organic fertilizers, they are, you flip to the back, they're the cheapest ingredients
possible with like a tomato on the front for tomato fertilizer. It's like you need tomato
fertilizer. You just need annual flowering plant, regular fertilization. Same with cannabis.
But you'll read the back and it'll say, cotton seed meal. I mean, the heaviest GMO pesticide
spray probably sprayed at harvest day with a lot of soy too, right? Soy is similar. And
then you'll see a corn gluten meal or corn meal. And then you'll see which corn is GMO
around, you know, and then you'll see animal byproduct waste. You'll see meat meal, like
ground up meat and stuff in there that makes the protein. And so the further that you get
down the rabbit hole of understanding why you got into growing organic, and then you
find out that all the products on the market are actually like a regurgitation. And then
they sell it to you like, yeah, but we're using a waste and isn't that recycling? You're
like, yeah, but you can go recycle that shit somewhere else. I don't want your slaughterhouse
waste in my cannabis. And so I think a lot of our customers resonate with that. But many
of them didn't know. They just go, what do you mean? It says organic. You're like, no,
no, no, for organic use. The National Organic Program says that dead cow is now usable on
an organic farm. It does not mean that or that cow was organically raised or humanely
raised. So,
So, uh, you mentioned heavy metals and, um, one thing when you're growing with salt, you
really want to flush it. And that's to get out your nitrogen, your phosphorus and your
potassium that's built up in there. But those are not the heavy metals that people are talking
about that. Um, I don't, I'm not really educated on the heavy metals and the testings and how,
um, sometimes they come out hot and somebody on a commercial scale can grow and the heavy
metals will be flagged and they can't sell it. Sometimes that could be from the wind
blowing it outdoors. I've heard, uh, can blow dirt up onto your plants. So you got to clean
it if you're outdoors. I've heard other people talking about living soils could leave heavy
metal traces in your, in your cannabis and get it. And it'll fail testing on a, on the
Colorado market. I don't know. Every state's a little bit different.
Michigan, Colorado, California, a lot of them are strict. A lot of these legislators just
copy each other's rules because they don't know where to start. And that me too process
of just copying rules is create some problems because, um, a lot of this is lobbying and
the biggest growers that had the biggest warehouses were all converted retrofitted hydroponic
warehouses. And so you'd imagine all they have to do is take water and nutrient. And
so if they had to compete like on mold, that would be a problem. They're indoors. That's
going to be more likely than heavy metals. And it used to be that a lot of these hydroponic
nutrients, they're just awful, full of heavy metals. And so when, um, the testing started,
a lot of the hydroponic nutrients would get cleaned up. So you can easily buy hydroponic
nutrients that you can test that don't have heavy metals in them. And so that'll allow
you to create, create, grow a clean product. When it comes to living soil, um, the argument
is different. The argument is that these political lobbying, they allow you to remediate mold
because hydro growers have that problem. So do anybody indoors, but they literally will
allow you to clean that mold up off the weed and then sell it to the market still. But
what they wouldn't do is allow someone that failed for heavy metal, which arguably less
than like the amounts they put as far as the restriction, all the soil outdoors everywhere
has more than that. So anybody grows some marijuana outdoors, they're going to have
a problem with that soil, potentially having more than a lot of the living soil recipes.
But there are some living soil ingredients that can be problematic. So build a soil has
had an issue in the past where as the commercial laws got tighter and tighter, you have grows
that were passing like flying colors and you realize, oh, well, there were 10 cycles deep
by the time the laws got activated or some of these brand new grows is their very first
cycle. And so there might be more residual from the soil mixing. Um, but for the home
consumer, the levels that they were testing, I don't think we're of any concern compared
to what normal soil would look like for thousands of years, just comparing. So it almost seemed
like a political issue where they're like, Hey, hydro can pass heavy metals. No problem.
We can clean up dirty moldy weed and we can sell it. But if soil starts to win and they
grow five acres of cannabis outside, we're fucked the price per pound. We're never going
to compete. That started happening. And so you saw some shift towards the heavy metal
testing and I think lobbying. And now you have people that if they grow on living soil
without thinking about it, you can definitely fail. Um, you can be putting copious amounts
of animal ocean based products, kelp meal, things like this that will have arsenic or
cadmium. Those are the two real heavy ones that they've been testing for that seem to
be an issue. Um, and it can build up and it can happen where you pop hot and that hot
may be arguably lower because they don't have that restriction in food. Um, and it even
goes deeper. Like baby food is where you might have heard of some heavy metal issues in the
past because babies are so sensitive. And so they do a lot of testing, but what they've
found is that there is, um, like organic arsenic versus non-organic arsenic, and that there's
some differences there. And so kelp meal, it's said it's sold as an animal food and
some kelp meal will have up to 20 parts per million of arsenic and some will have very,
very little depending on batch to batch. What they found is that it's all predominantly
organic arsenic and that's not a human health issue. Um, but it could be if you are not
differentiating and in cannabis, I believe Michigan says organic art inorganic arsenic,
but when you send it to the lab that fails you, there's zero differentiation. And so
it becomes kind of political of knowing like, do I have to test for just that? What do I
do? So build a soil took the high road and instead of arguing that like, Hey, that a
little tiny bit of organic arsenic from kelp should be allowed. We just decided to remove
it even though we fucking love kelp meal. So in our ultra clean recipe, um, really 3.0
light, all of them, we have heavy metal testing on, they're phenomenally low, very safe to
use and all of our inputs are good to go. We have all the testing and can provide it
for you, but there was a local line product. There was a calcium phosphate we got from
a couple of different suppliers, but there was one in particular that would fluctuate.
And so sometimes you test it and it would be below three parts per million. Sometimes
it would be up towards nine parts per million or higher in cadmium. And when you're adding
little bits, that's fine, but we really rely on our living soils, having lots of minerals
in them. So we just eliminated those and we use soil lab testing to replace the ingredient
instead of just going, well, we don't have that. And so build a soil was able to use
an organic rice bran that's very high in phosphorus. And we're able to use small amounts of fish
bone meal without overdoing the sodium and keeping very low amounts of heavy metals.
And so 3.0 craft blend light, all of those, they test really well in heavy metals where
before we would have more kelp meal in there, more crustacean meal in there. And if a grower
got a batch and then just planted right into it and maybe fed other additional inputs that
had heavy metals in them and they had no idea what was happening, they could get tested
and all of a sudden they have a huge lesson in heavy metals to learn. At home, it's pretty
simple. All of our best practices work really well for the home grower.
Yeah, I've never had a problem where I've never really noticed anything. Living soil,
my herbs always smoother, easier to toke, not coughing up all the time. I mean, you
call sometimes I'm taking a big hit, but it's so much smoother than the indoor, like you
said, the salt, you can tell the difference. I can tell it's much harsher. Somebody's using
general hydroponics. I cough really quickly.
What's interesting to me is I noticed a lot of the herb, even though I'll have different
varieties will all taste similar and have similar profiles when they're grown with the
same exact nutrient. Where when you're growing a living soil, I feel like it allows the plant
to show you its true natural profile, what it would produce without being influenced
that way.
I have had my first round, somebody was teaching me, he sent me up some Northern Light clones.
I was in Spain. He was like, OK, you water with this nutrient. He didn't tell me once
a week. So I was watering with the nutrient every, every watering every two days I was
giving it nutrient. And it was popping like a sparkler. Whenever you spoke that it would
you could see the nitrogen and phosphorus and potassium in little pockets just because
they're all flammable, flammable chemicals on their own. Whenever you have potassium
or phosphorus, they all that's what they make bombs out of pretty much.
Well, I don't know how it works. Like I used to think that too. And I don't have an answer.
So I'm not trying to debate. But I feel like the plant takes that nutrient and it converts
it into a leaf. It's no longer phosphorus up there or potassium up there. You do a tissue
test and you will see a little more potassium and some other things. But the phosphorus
is an energy source. It usually doesn't make it up in the plant, at least in alarming levels,
even if you're not flushing and even you're using a lot. But I noticed overfeeding plants
stresses them. And what I've noticed is they create micro seeds that you can't even tell.
They're the beginning formation of like a cluster and any bit of moisture, it pops and
crackles. And so you have little micro seeds, not even developed seeds. And to the average
girl, you may not even notice it. They break down way inside and you see this little tiny
piece of something. I noticed that snap, crackle, pop, if you ever have that happening. I really
think that's possible. But at the end of the day, I'd be growing like I'd have advanced
nutrients and other just I was using the Lucas method and lots of different formulas out there.
The Lucas with the floor Nova actually kind of not liked and that had kind of an organic
goopiness to it. Maybe that was first step in that direction. But I would be feeding
like my peppers and tomatoes and I'd be looking at the bottle like, well, fuck, do I have
to flush my tomatoes or is it safe to eat? Or like, how does that work? And those questions
started to pass off into cannabis. And I started thinking, wouldn't it be better just to use
something that I wasn't worried about? And the argument on the other side of the thing
is that organics just makes those chemical nutrients on tap for the plants and they're
in the same form. While I scientifically agree with that, I think there's definitely some
differences and how that happens. Meaning, if the plant has to interact with the soil
to get the nutrient to take it up, it's not being force fed. Where when you put that chemical
nutrient in the water, it is forced to take it when it drinks. And so you can definitely
over and under do things a lot more drastically when it comes to hydro. Yeah, it's amazing
the differences you can produce. They call it the phenotypic expression, whether it's
just different nutrients or different environment, growing outdoors, indoors, you can dramatically
change some herb based on the way you grow it. And across the board, all of our customers
and everyone that I've known that have grown multiple ways, the argument usually isn't
that soil doesn't taste better or that it isn't more naturally easier to grow better.
Like on your first crop, you're going to have a higher terpene content than trying to learn
how to grow hydro. But I will say there's some great hydro growers that learn how to
get their shit right. At the end of the day, though, I just prefer not to vision myself
and like some white lab coat telling the plant what to do. I figure like overalls and saying,
what do you want from me? How can I serve you? And it seems to be that difference in
mindset that a lot of times causes that crossover to living soil. We're looking to be a steward
of the plant instead of like a dominatrix, so to speak. Right. So, yeah. So speaking
on that, I remember watching one of your videos, you were talking about like just a little
solo cup and your plant was so tall, branched out and it was something with the lighting.
You have a little special talk about the lighting. So when you're doing some clones or doing
some something in bed, it doesn't need that full 100% HLG lighting. You can turn it down
to 60. It actually like a lower lighting. Yeah. Especially that little cup. Like, I
mean, imagine this, you're busy. You're thinking you got lots to do. You're around your house,
just kind of hanging maybe in some sweatpants, cruising, doing stuff. You can go the whole
day without eating. You're like, oh shit, I got to eat. I mean, I know not everybody's
like that, but it's something that can happen. But I tell you what, you get up at six a.m.
You start swinging a hammer or something. You start digging a ditch. Like your body's
going to break you down and tell you, you need food now. You have to stop what you're
doing. Your stomach's raging. You can't think straight. It's like need food. Your plants
are similar, right? They're not stupid. They start getting one more of one thing. They're
going to need the other. It's all about balance. And so you take a little tiny clone and you
crank up the light. That's great. It'll be healthy for a few hours. The next day, you
better have a plan for nutrition, for water, keeping up with that environment that you
put it in. It's like asking a marathon runner to go in the desert and just go. And so when
we're going to, when we know we're just going to keep them in this little tiny cup and we
know that, hey, we're looking at our flower room going, ah, it's going to be a few more
weeks before I get to deal with those clones. I'm busy. The easiest thing to do is to lower
the demand and just allow them to be lazy. You turn that light down. It lowers that desire
to grow because it's not being force fed the light, which means that it doesn't have to
transpire water, which means that. So if you picture a plant growing and it's got its stomata
and it needs to open that to receive the light, start growing. Well, as soon as that happens,
it can start to dehydrate. And so unless you keep the humidity perfect, now it's going
to call for moisture out of that little tiny cup. And if you're not in there dripping on
it or watering it or bottom watering it and doing a perfect job, it'll run out of water.
Then it starts cascading down where it starts moving the leaves away and starts to get burned
because it's not absorbing the nutrients of the water and avoiding all of that. We just
dim the light and now it stays kind of like a house plant where you almost need to do
nothing for weeks at a time except for barely keep any water in there. And even if you over
water it, it's not like trying to grow so fast that it's hurting itself. It just kind
of goes, ah, well, just chill here for a little while. It makes a huge difference. And that's
how we got such tall clones is because I kept on saying, you know, next week we'll get to
that and just leave the light low, give it a little bit of water. And if you really need
to, you can use like some liquid fish, something that's kind of an all in one complete formula
and that'll keep everything, you know, happy for the plant.
So yeah, that goes back to, I used to just use a fluorescence when they were clones or
babies. I mean, it's perfect for them. It doesn't push them too much. A lot of people
have this swinging. This learning curve is the word I'm looking for when they go to LEDs
because they're so bright. Yeah. Don't know that increased in your, it's start them low
and then they slowly increase them up to maybe 90% when you go into transition. Yep. That's
about where I'm at. And then when they're in full blood and full, full budding and blooming,
then I'll turn them up to a hundred, but crank them down a little bit.
Yep. And the number of hours of the day. So imagine this a hundred percent light on 12
hours a day, a hundred percent light on 24 hours a day. That's 200% light. Cause you
actually went to double the hours of light and we're trickle charging these plants. So
50% for 24 hours is the same as a hundred percent for 12 hours. It's about the total
light for the day or the daily lighting integral and lowering that allows things to get a little
bit easier on us and you can grow higher quality. It's not so demanding. And this is just like
an indoor back in the day. I mean, guys who grow sealed rooms and they find out, Oh, I'm
out of CO2. So guess what we do add CO2. Then you can add more nutrients, then you can have
more water. So supercharging things becomes harder. It's like driving a car million miles
per hour on the racetrack. If you're worried you're hitting the edges, just slow the fuck
down and you will have a very healthy run. Then you can start to learn how to speed it
up without hurting things. And it does, it makes a huge, huge difference. So,
So we are about the 120 mark here. I think we could go ahead and probably wrap this up.
Yeah, I can talk to you all day, man. This is fun. We could keep going on and on. So
I want to let the listeners know about the availability. Where are you located in Colorado?
You're pretty much in, I know the way to grow is where I've stopped and got some of your
product before. I think Way to Grow just ordered like a truckload of cubic footers. They'll
be stocked up for the season. They got a 3.0 in our light soil. You know, we've been really,
we're a small brand. And so getting into the wholesale trade has been hard for us. The
margins are lower. We got to make stuff quick, get a whole bunch on one pallet and get it
out. And you know, we weren't really geared up to do that. We don't have a billion dollars
of funding. And so it may not be everywhere all the time, but the easiest way is to go
to buildaswell.com, go to our store locator, and just look up what the closest store to
you. We have them all over the country that buy our products and then call the store first
and just be like, Hey, you guys stocked up. Can I come down? Or if they're your local
shop, just go visit it, hang out and tell them to buy more buildaswell.
Yeah, because I've heard it. I've got one in store locator says they have it. But then
when you get to the store, they say, Oh, well, we got to order it.
Yeah. And you don't want to drive three hours to the local shop just because you're stoked
and find out they don't have any. So call ahead. That usually helps. And then it helps
us because now they're getting calls on buildassoil, things like that. But we are online at buildassoil.com.
And one of the downsides, right, is we have tons of compost and rock dust in our soil.
So it's not lightweight, which means it costs a little bit of money to ship it. But realistically,
comparatively to going and buying bulk ingredients and mixing yourself just to get a couple of
bags, it's a lot cheaper. So a lot of our customers go buy like three or four bags at
a time, have them mailed to their door, or they'll get one of our kits that comes on
a pallet, or they'll split a pallet with a buddy and go in halfsies or whatever, or like
with three people and they'll get a better rate on the soil just because it comes all
at once on a pallet. But in Colorado, we're on the Western slope. We're in Montrose, Colorado,
which is in between Grand Junction and Telluride. So a lot of people that are over on this side,
it's further spread out, but it's a smaller world. So anyone in the Western slope, a lot
of times we see those customers, they drive up from Durango, they come over from Grand
Junction, they drive over from Denver. But typically, when people aren't from Colorado,
they call me go, yo, I'm gonna be in Colorado. I'm gonna stop by and visit. I'm like, cool,
where are you gonna be? They're like, I'm flying into Denver. I'm like, well, you're
gonna have to drive seven hours over the Rocky Mountains in the middle of a snowstorm if
you want to come see me. But we love it when people stop by, they can see the in store
10 by 10 grow. And it's been huge for us because many of these soil companies, living soil
companies, they don't even grow or smoke. Some of them do, right? A lot of us are passionate
about this. But to me, it's always been something to walk the walk and say, come to our store,
live, see the growth growing in action. I'll show you what it looks like. Instead of saying,
yeah, 10 years ago, my body used to grow and we just did the soil science or we just made
a nutrient fertilizer company because of hemp or whatever. This is just what we do. I love
cannabis. It's a big part of my life. And I've tried to cross over like we're doing house
plants and other things, but a lot of us found gardening. We found food gardening. We found
house plants because we loved cannabis. And we thought, shit, I'm gonna grow up all these
plants. You know, I like the companion planning. It really got me into companion planning and
the living soil beds and what I could put in there to increase the terpenes like basil
or something marigold stuff like repel the pest and help with the nematodes. And one
other question, I know you do roll around to canicons and go to different events. I've
seen Build-A-Soil. I don't think I saw you there, but I know Martin was there, the guys
from RootWise, Miles from Fermented Plant Extracts. And I am going to be using the Fermented
Plant Extracts with this run that I'm using. I already top dressed with the 13 blend. I'm
using a little bison compost that I got from Grease, Mike Walsh. Grease is a pretty nice
product. So I'm doing a little tea with that, but I'm going to use the Fermented Plant Extracts
with the 3.0. Do you recommend going very light on the Fermented Plant Extracts? Because
on the bottle is like 0.5 ounces to 4 ounces per gallon is what the pic says.
I do an ounce per gallon. If you have, my rule of thumb is if you have a hundred gallon
thing of soil and you're just starting, you can go the lowest dose and always go the lowest
dose. I do to start off. No matter what to start off anything ever. But then when you're
trying to find your zone for what you like, I only go up to like four ounces a gallon.
If I've got a raging plant in a small container and I'm actually trying to get the ferment
to feed the plant a little bit through the soil. Normally what we're doing though, and
there's some big benefits. When we first started making the Kutz recipe, we used tons of oyster
shell flour. It's one of the big ingredients. Also crustacean meal. And those are both calcium
carbonate forms. And so when we had outdoor growers using our soils for the first time,
they started using ditch water or well water. Well, the ditch water around here, full of
bicarbonate. And so you water it in there. And finally the biology releases this calcium.
It says calcium carbonate and it rips off the carbon side and it has free-form calcium
for the plant. And the water comes in and goes, ha ha, calcium carbonate. And they reform.
So we noticed that an acid in the water, not like pH in the water, but an acid to neutralize
that bicarbonate fixed everything. And a lot of growers out here would use like vinegar
on their orchard or sulfur injector systems at the big orchards. And so when it comes
down to watering living soil, we still have all these calcium and all these things to
release. And you start to realize, oh, my ferment is like 3.5 pH. It's a descaler.
It like releases calcium. EM1, you could use it to like scale industrial equipment. And
so that I think is part of the benefit. We're adding this like acidic, ubiquitous fermentation
that exists everywhere in nature in the sense that like, how do you make sauerkraut? You
just go chop up cabbage with some salt and put it in a jar. Well, the lactobacillus is
ubiquitous. It's already part of the picture. That's how it works. So when you take a ferment
that's full of lacto, that's everywhere in nature, we're doing two things. One, I think
we're like acidifying the water and helping cycle nutrients. But we're also adding this
essence of life, which is death and decay. And that's why it smells. But that is what
we're trying to do in the soil. We're trying to break down this organic matter into a more
plant usable form. And so we're almost like, instead of waiting for the logs and the fire
to create the fire, it's like putting lighter fluid on it. We get to go in there with a
ferment and like release and cause nutrient cycling. And one of the things I remind myself
of is how funny some of these lessons are in life. But on ICMAG, we're all talking about
compost teas. And the talk was if you brew an anaerobic tea with ciliates and these other
things in there, and it had not enough oxygen, you could kill your plant. I've never seen
that happen. You can brew a horrible compost tea and yeah, it may not lead to all the benefits
that you wanted. So it was a waste of energy, but it never killed anything. And you'd still
get growth and all the dead nutrients and stuff. It would just re go aerobic in the
soil and the soil would kind of consume that bad tea. But when it comes down to the crowd,
like the Ingham crowd that was teaching it at the time, they wouldn't look at the anaerobic
stuff at all. They're like, that's bad. Good stuff is all full of oxygen. And then we had
this ferment crowd that was like, yo, this stuff's dead and raunchy and it crushes. And
so I just love that, that lesson of life where you're like, one could be so right and the
other could be right. And they can be diametrically opposed to each other and they still both
work. And I remember at EM1, the guy was like, hey, brew a compost tea and they just add
a little EM1 at the end. That way you have both in there. And I was thinking, what? You're
going to ruin it. But it works. And I feel like nature doesn't have these rules. They
just have teams of biology that do jobs, whatever that may be. And typically that's cleaning
up organic matter, decaying it, breaking it back down. I remember in science originally
we were taught nothing disappears. It just goes into different form. So if you light
something on fire, it's not gone. It's just gone into the ashes that are now in the sky
spread everywhere and the different gases that were off and released, but they're still
in the universe. So when it comes to ferments, we're kind of tapping in there. We're taking
already biologically broken down waste and allowing it to be ready for the plant. The
other thing is it feeds the biology that's in there and the acidity of it. So there's
like this trifecta there that somehow they just, they do definitely work. And I will
say of the, of our customers that buy ferments, because they're expensive for what it is.
If you learn to make them on your own, they're practically free. But we all know having stinky
stuff around the house at the right phase all the time is like a shitty job. So it's
nice if someone just bottles it for you get to tap in. But at the end of the day, when
we're using all these ferments, it's kind of like, do we want it to increase just the
exact size like used to be talked about yield, or do we want to have the best amount of resin,
the best terpene, the best compounds. And so a lot of people that are growing for hash
that are pressing their own rosin and doing fresh frozen and all this stuff, they swear
by adding K and F and ferments and some of these things. And I can't tell whether it's
the chicken or the egg. Like I can't tell if people that are so heady, they just say
you have to add that because it sounds good or whether they just know it produces better
results. But over a decade of doing this, and trying a lot of people's herbs, like at
these events, people bring us lots of flour to share with us. Some of the best herb I've
ever had has been by these growers that do some of their own natural fermentation products
and they add this stuff to it. And it's noticeable. And so it's hard to ignore. And I think a
lot of us end up in living soil, because we try somebody's herb that's so damn good. We're
like, All right, how did you do that? I will copy everything.
Yeah, I got for smell, flavor, taste. That's important to me. I will suffer my
yield just a little bit just to make sure we can always tinker with you later. But if
you have no flavor and no like what the fuck's the point?
Yeah, it's just I love the like you said, I can't smoke the orange and lemony ones all
the time. But it is an occasional thing. I like it. It just makes my mouth salivate.
It's like a like a candy almost sometimes. Yeah, but I lean more towards the skunky,
gassy the that but when you make tentures out of that, they don't taste very good.
No. So the if you like having some fuel all the time, you can balance it with tinctures
and other different stuff. And I feel like for whatever reason, when I talk to really
experienced smokers, a lot of us gravitate towards that fuel. And I can't tell if some
of us are just more mature. So we came out of an era when like, oh, gee, Kush was the
fucking like the best, like, you know, and so having that fuel was somehow reminiscent
of like the best. But I don't think that's it. I honestly think that as we get a little bit
higher tolerance, those really fuely ones that come with these theols and like these,
I don't think it's just terpene, something that really like it helps. It's potent. I like
when you have high tolerance, you end up liking the strongest shit. So I like the
karyophylline and humeline. It's one of the sesquiterpene. It's just part cannabinoid and
part terpene. It's like the intermediate. I think that is the synergistic part of the plant that
when you got more of the sesquiterpene, which have that dank smell and feel that's a I think
it just brings back memories, like you said. Yeah, absolutely. It just makes you feel more
comfortable because of that spell that nostalgia and that memory. And a lot of it is the smell.
The smells create so much more effect than people. People realize. Yeah, we eat with our nose too.
I mean, you go to have a good meal. It's you want to try fact. You don't want it just to
just have good texture or just to have a decent taste. You want it to have the right temperature,
the right texture, the right aroma, the right taste that completely transcends eating into
what becomes an experience. One that's worthy of paying for and going out with friends. And I
think cannabis is similar. We all have this thing where it's like, we're going to share some herb
with a friend. We just want to like, I don't know a lot of other things, but with cannabis growers,
I've noticed they will take their very best herb to give it to their friend because they would never
want to like embarrassingly taste their worst now that they grew and give it to a buddy. They're
willing to give their best first because they just want to put their best foot forward and say,
I grew that. You know, like it all doesn't turn out this way, but you're really like,
you get the good shit. Yeah. Well, Jeremy, next time I am going to come down, I'm going to
go down and hang out with miles at his, uh, his farm and hang out and do an interview with him,
do some videotape and definitely going to stop by Montrose. If you're ever in Denver, let me know.
Uh, also, if you want to go skiing in Breckenridge area, if you're ever in that area, let me know.
We can go skiing and hit the slopes. Awesome, man. Well, I appreciate you having me on today.
This has been a blast and like, please stop by if you come to town. It'd be great to meet you in
person. Yeah, no doubt. Uh, highly, highly, uh, respect everything you're doing. And I really
appreciate you come on the show and explaining to everybody what, what you got going on and how to
use your products. Thank you so much. I appreciate it. All right, Jeremy, you have a great day and
we'll be in touch soon. Okay. All right. Peace. All right. Peace.
I want to thank everybody for tuning into today's episode. I'd like to give a shout out to Bill
at the Grove, Jen and Conifer. He's always hooked me up. He's got the cheapest CO2 you can find in
the state. I believe it's at cost. He's got soil at cost. Uh, if you're ever in the Conifer area,
make sure to stop in and give Bill a shout out and, uh, support local. Also, I'd like to give
a shout out to miles. Phillip Kelly from fermented plant extracts. He hit me up with the link to, uh,
hook up with Jeremy for this little episode greatly appreciated. I know he's going to be putting on
some fermented plant extract classes in July here in Denver. So if you're interested, make sure to
hit him up on his Instagram at for a minute plant extracts or we should taste good. Thanks miles.
Peace.
Vereinments and family with Lucky
Vibrant and a little bit of fun.
See the joint ain't necessarily the point, but I want more.
Vibrant and a little bit of fun.