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We started in living soil. That’s the organic way, and it has deep roots here on Vancouver Island. We grew that way for years before we ever used a bottle of mineral fertilizer. What changed our minds wasn’t doubt about the soil. It was the calendar. A licensed cannabis farm has to hit release dates and lab targets. The soil works on its own clock, and sometimes that clock isn’t always aligned with provincial and direct delivery buying cycles.
So we ran tests to see where the two methods could work together. The answer was a small amount of mineral feeding, far less than a synthetic grower would use, but more than zero.
This page explains how we got there.
Living soil synganic cannabis is the name we gave the result.
Organic versus synthetic is one of the oldest fights in cannabis growing.
It’s a real one, with real trade-offs.
Organic growing feeds the soil. You add things like compost, worm castings, kelp, and fish meal. Tiny living things in the soil break those down into food the plant can use.
It’s slow, it’s rich, and it rewards patience.
Synthetic growing skips the soil. It uses mineral salts, the same nutrients in a form the plant can drink right away. These go straight to the roots through the water, usually in a lifeless material like coco coir or rockwool. The grower controls exactly what the plant gets and when.
Most articles tell you to pick a side. We didn’t pick a side. We ran into a wall.
We started in living soil because that’s the tradition here. Vancouver Island has grown cannabis this way for decades, long before it was legal. The soil was alive. The plants were healthy. And the flower had a depth we still build everything around.
Then we hit a moment that changed how we thought. A round of G-Wagon was in week five of flower. The plants were drinking hard. They needed calcium faster than the soil could release it. You can see this first in the top leaves, where the newest growth works the hardest. Those leaves start to stress while the rest of the plant still looks fine.
The soil wasn’t broken. It was just slow, and the plant needed more. By the time the soil caught up, the problem was already baked into a harvest we wouldn’t ship for two more months.
That gap is what this page is about. We’re a licensed Canadian micro-grower who worked through this in our own rooms. We’re not a company selling plant food. We’re not a blog repeating someone else’s grow.
Organic growing feeds the soil, not the plant. You add things like compost, worm castings, kelp, bone meal, and fish meal. Then bacteria, fungi, and other tiny living things break them down into the nutrients a plant needs. The plant gets fed on the soil’s schedule, not yours. This whole system has a name: the soil food web. It’s slow on purpose. Food becomes available as the living things process it, not the second you add it.
Walk into a living soil room early in growth and it doesn’t look like a feeding operation at all. There are no tanks of bright nutrient water. There are no feeding lines clicking on a timer. There’s just soil, dark and dense, the kind you can squeeze in your hand and feel hold together. Plants grow out of it without anyone seeming to feed them. The real work happened earlier, when we built the soil. What you smell isn’t fertilizer. It’s closer to a forest floor after rain.
Earthy. A little sweet. Alive.
That smell is the soil talking. You learn to trust it. A healthy living soil room tells you it’s working before the plants are big enough to prove it.
This isn’t a method we left behind. It’s the base everything else sits on. Here’s what we love about it, after years of growing this way. The flavour gets complex in a way that’s hard to copy. Pests stay down because so many different living things compete in the soil. And the soil gets better the longer you use it. A bed that’s been running for years is richer than a fresh one, and it grows better cannabis.
However during heavy flowering, the plant can want food faster than the soil can release it. Calcium in weeks 3-6 of flower is the clearest example. There’s also batch-to-batch change in lab results. Living soil reacts to the plant, but it doesn’t repeat itself as exactly as a regulated supply chain sometimes needs. Two runs of the same cultivar in the same soil can come back from the lab far enough apart to matter, especially when a buyer is expecting a certain number.
Synthetic growing uses mineral salts. The nutrients get mixed into water and fed to the roots, usually in a lifeless material like coco coir or rockwool. The plant can use them right away because there’s no soil life in the middle doing the breakdown work.
Growers control this with two numbers. One is EC, which measures how much plant food is dissolved in the water. The other is pH, which measures how acidic the water is. The big appeal is control. You pick the recipe. You pick the strength. And you can change it tomorrow.
A pure synthetic room feels different to stand in. The growing material is lifeless. It just holds the roots and the water. The food lives in the tank, not the material. Everything runs on control: meters, pens, and exact recipes that change on the grower’s schedule, not the soil’s. It’s clean, it’s easy to read, and it responds fast.
We’ve used mineral programs ourselves, and the strengths are real. Take that calcium problem from before. In a synthetic system, you don’t wait on the soil. You change the mix, and within a day the plant has what it asked for. Every plant gets the same measured feed, so they grow more alike. You can steer the whole thing in a way you can’t with living soil, because you’re not working with a living system. You’re turning a dial.
But we noticed something else. The plants were consistent and the yields were strong, yet the range of flavour was narrower. The complex flavour that living soil gave us wasn’t there in the same way once the soil life was gone. The flower was clean and good. It just said less. That’s what stopped us from going fully synthetic. We wanted the consistency and the complexity, not one without the other.
This is the question people really want answered. And we have something most growers writing about this don’t: side-by-side results from growing the same genetics two different ways.
First, a quick bit of science. The smells and flavours in cannabis come from compounds called terpenes. The plant builds terpenes from raw material it pulls together inside its own tissue, and it needs steady energy and a full range of nutrients to do it well. A soil full of many different tiny living things feeds the plant a broader, steadier diet than lifeless material does. The better fed the plant, the more of that flavour it can build.
We grew Roll-X two ways: once in living soil, once in a pure synthetic program. Same genetics, same hands, just different food. The living soil rounds didn’t always test higher for total terpenes. But the flavour read as more layered. The synthetic version of the same plant came out cleaner and more single-note. It had the main smell without the deeper notes underneath.
That’s the difference worth understanding. It’s not that one is good and one is bad. It’s that variety in the soil shows up as variety in the jar. More kinds of food going in, more kinds of flavour coming out. This isn’t an opinion. It’s biology. And it’s why we didn’t walk away from the soil when we added minerals.
Yes. Farmers outside cannabis have done it for decades. It’s not a strange idea. It just has one mistake you have to avoid. The key is EC, that measure of how much food is in the water. A strong mineral program, the kind built for coco or rockwool, will harm and slowly kill the life in the soil. A gentle mineral program, run at a fraction of that strength, can live alongside a healthy soil.
This is the exact question we answered in our own rooms. We didn’t find the right strength by reading a chart. We found it by testing different EC levels and watching the soil tell us when we’d pushed too far. When we backed off, it recovered. We ran that loop until we found the line where the minerals did their job and the soil stayed alive.
The level we landed on is lower than most synthetic growers use. It’s also clearly more than nothing.
“There’s a real fear in this industry that any amount of salt-based fertilizer kills your soil. We’ve disproven that in our own rooms. The dose is everything.”
— Kyp Rowe, VP Brand
There are helpful root fungi that team up with the plant, and they keep living at the EC levels we run. That’s not a promise off a label. It’s what we’ve watched happen, run after run, in soil that’s been working for years. The idea that any salt kills all soil life is too simple, and we can prove it wrong from experience.
Nutrient lockout is when the food is in the soil, but the plant can’t take it up. It usually comes down to pH or EC drifting too far off.
It can happen at both extremes. In organic growing, the pH can drift in soil that isn’t managed. In synthetic growing, too much feed can overload the roots. The signs are similar either way: leaves yellowing in a pattern that doesn’t match normal hunger, and growth that stalls even though you’re feeding on schedule.
It’s rare in our rooms, for a built-in reason. Living soil steadies its own pH, and we keep our mineral EC low on purpose. When we do need to check for lockout, we look at the runoff, the water that drains out the bottom. Comparing what goes in against what comes out tells us whether the problem is the feed or the plant’s ability to drink it.
That natural pH steadiness is one reason we built on living soil in the first place. Growers in coco or rockwool have to fix pH by hand at every feeding, because the material does nothing to help. Living soil does some of that work for us.
We didn’t drop organic, and we didn’t switch to synthetic. We built something that keeps the living soil we trust and adds the mineral control that running a real, licensed farm taught us to value. It isn’t a halfway compromise. It’s a deliberate mix of both.
“Living soil tells you what the plant gets from the ground. Synganic tells you what we add to it. Anything else would have been us pretending.”
— Taylor King, Head Grower
The real question was never organic versus synthetic. It was how much of each, and in what order.
“We didn’t sit down and theorize a third path. We ran into the limits of the first one and built our way to the second.”
— Kyp Rowe, VP Brand
This isn’t a theory. It’s what we do every day. The proof is on the shelf at our farmgate store: Roll-X, G-Wagon, and After Eighth.
Read the full guide Living soil synganic cannabis growing.
If you judge cannabis by more than the THC number on the label, the grow method is one of the best clues you have. So ask a producer how they grow. If the answer is vague, words like “premium” or “craft” or “hand-selected,” that tells you something. If they can name the method, the ingredients, and the reason behind each choice, that tells you something better.
That’s the whole point of naming ours.
Read more about VCC’s cultivation process in How Craft Cannabis is Grown
Neither one wins every time. They solve different problems. Organic growing builds complex flavour and healthy soil over time. Synthetic growing gives you speed and control, which a regulated farm often needs. Our living soil synganic method uses both instead of choosing one.
Yes, if you keep the mineral feeding gentle. A strong mineral program harms soil life, but a light one can live alongside healthy soil. We’ve grown this way in real production for Roll-X.
Living soil cannabis often has more layered flavour, because a healthy, diverse soil feeds the plant a fuller diet than lifeless material does. It doesn’t always test higher for total terpenes. It just tends to taste more complex.
