I wanted to come back and follow this up properly in case anyone else happens by who might be interested in high brix farming and hasn’t come across it, or the notion of a “living soil”, before.
If it’s the DB High Brix kit you’re interested in, know that the kit contains
everything needed to make what is described by the words ‘soil food web’, with very little effort from the farmer
. Moreover,
@Doc Bud ’s kit is specifically, through years of R&D, optimised to provide a soil food web fine tuned to growing cannabis. This fine tuning gets better with each cycle too (to a point) as the roots and leaves of the plant are recycled. As
@Duggan has put it, training the soil to grow cannabis
So I think the best place to start (or at least an excellent place), if you’re totally new to it, is with Dr Elaine Ingham, a pioneering researcher in the field of soil science, on the soil-food web... remember, LOS gardeners work to sustain this themselves with various soil amendments and teas etc. Doc’s kit has all this sorted for you, and then some...
(I originally had a link here - but I’ve found a version I can embed here, I think... let’s see - ok it works best in full screen mode, Vimeo clips behave strangely)
Excerpt from “The Symphony of the Soil”
The ‘then some’ I mentioned above is because when you add a high brix approach to this, less emphasis is put on getting organic matter into the soil and more emphasis goes into the mineral content and balance (ratio is
everything here). So as Doc says, we want a micro herd that likes to eat rocks, not sugar. In this way the high brix soils seek to create the balance found in tropical volcanic soils, or those found in some regions of Europe too (eh Conradino
), and likely other places that I don’t know about.
So high brix farming is both different and similar to LOS (Living Organic Soil) methods and both are premised on maintaining the soil life and letting that take care of the plants’ health.
High brix is the way wine grape growers do it, and some hops growers too, and plenty of food growers too (more and more). I was fully and forever sold on what Doc was trying to do when I read him (last year while trawling old journals) saying that it just makes sense to treat cannabis like fine wine.
Hell yeah
Plus, now we have
@LadyGaea taking things to a whole new level with food and beverage pairings for different cannabis! Inspired
I hope some folks who might not have seen her before enjoy the Elaine Ingham video (like I said - the vid is the first image, it’s kinda easy to miss it and scroll past, esp. on a phone).
And I’m not dissing LOS - it’s fantastic too (Van Stank’s and Bobrown’s gardens are testaments to this). And mineralised LOS is a great way to grow - I loved it! But I think I love this kit approach more.
I may employ the other at times again too... down the track...