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When we first moved to this property, we waited two years before deciding where the garden should be built. We wanted to see which way the wind blows and which way the water flows before deciding to insert our will upon the property. We live well out in an unincorporated part of our county, adjacent to a National Seashore. Though we are in a neighborhood, everything that surrounds us is wild.

When we first built our beds, we took advantage of the back of a neighbor’s fence, which from our side is south facing. The importance of a south facing fence to border a garden cannot be overstated. The fence reflects and absorbs heat, making the growing environment warmer than if you only relied only on air temperature. This is especially important if you live in a coastal or colder climate. 

So we built our initial beds, with hardware cloth at the bottom to prevent gophers (for about ten years). Around the beds, we built a wire fence with spaces wide enough between the links that a raccoon could not climb the fence. Between this fence and a dog in the neighbor’s yard, we had no raccoon issues for years. When the family next door moved and took the dogs, raccoons came into play. They could climb the wood fence and jump down into our beds. More on them later.

So that first year, we looked for the most economical, while still efficient form of fertilizing our beds. We looked at chicken and cow fertilizer, but there’s been too much written about animal urine in fertilizer for me to go that route again. We used chicken manure at our old house and after two years, the soils would not grow. It was the urine that burned the soil.

I have found, if you are going to use fecal matter for fertilizer, the safest, cheapest, and best method is horse manure. We contacted a local horse ranch and asked if manure was available from them. They were thrilled to get rid of a truck full of dung, so they packed it up and drove it over to our house, where it was dumped and then covered with a plastic tarp for one year. 

In that year, my children and I were able to build the beds. We did it by putting every barrow of dirt we dug out through a sieve to catch the largest rocks. (Some rocks are good for water flow). While we were doing the slow labor, the horse manure was composting. By allowing the manure to bake under the dark plastic tarp, all live bacteria perished, and after a year, we were left with pathogen free fertilizer. We mixed layers of horse manure with layers of native soil.

Let me tell you, that was some rich soil. And the manure cost nothing.

Eventually, those beds had to be re-built, because we live in a rain zone, wood rots, and gophers eventually break through. There came a year when Karen and I stood there one afternoon, in mock American Gothic style, and watched a carrot being sucked into the vast deep before we could so much as engage in a tug of war. 

We contracted to have the beds re-built, and Karen designed a more efficient method, by dividing the beds into 22 separate compartments. We also added the privacy screen to the fence, which adds some vital additional heat to the grow.

There was only one problem: We asked the contractors to bring in some organic soil to fill the beds. They did so and the soil was lovely to look at, but it was a nightmare to grow with, because it was so sticky. 

To break up the stickiness, I began the long game approach by planting lots of root vegetables to start breaking up the soil. Radishes, turnips, carrots, parsnips and more began the job, but it was obvious this was going to take years. 

I researched how people used to grow in my region and discovered their preferred method of fertilization was salmon specifically, and fish in general. This solution was so obviously perfect, because fish is full of oil and that oil will help break up sticky soil. This got me thinking about where I could locate fish on the cheap. I do live close to the ocean and have access to where fish is caught. But I didn’t know any fishermen to score fish.

Instead, I made friends with butchers at meat markets that sell fish. Markets that sell fish usually sell fish scraps to restaurants for them to use as stock. This goes on all the time. I told the butcher what I wanted to do and that first year, it cost me $60 to fertilize 22 beds. So, it cost less than $3 a bed to completely fertilize my growing mediums. The next time I wanted to fertilize with fish, it only cost me a fat sack of Ultimate Purple for the butcher to help with his sleep issues. As a homegrower, I’m a big believer in bartering.

It took me three years of growing root vegetables and pouring compost tea every Sunday, applying a dusting of fire wood ash the first winter, and planting fish every winter, to finally turn that sticky soil into soft, fluffy dirt. I could only insert my arm to my wrist initially, and now, my arm slices through that fluffy soil all the way to the hardware cloth. Plants love to grow in fluffy dirt. Last year, I had to add some soil to each of the beds, and this time, I made certain to test it before committing. It had to be as fluffy as mine. There were other treatments I had to do to get each of the beds into optimal condition. I will detail those when this year’s grow moves from the cottage to the yard.

While all of this was going on, we made an extremely fortunate discovery. We have a spring up our hill. When we tested the water’s pH, it came out at 6.6. If you’re a cannabis grower, you know how fortunate this is. The water is full of micro and macro nutrients from the earth, but it has no chemicals, no chlorine, it’s pure and perfect for cannabis.

So we contracted the work and watched as a team of men dug out catch basins below where the spring flows to catch and clean the water. They put granite into the bottoms of each basin to clean the water in an ancient method. They attached pvc pipes to the catch basins and sent all the water to a 1,500 gallon container. We could have gotten a larger size, but that would have brought the county out for inspection. We’d rather just keep it without interference from the county. We then ran pvc piping around the entire property and into the beds, so that any outside water is from our spring. We also had a pump attached to the water, because even though it had some momentum from coming downhill, it still needed strength to reach and soak all 22 beds.

As you can imagine, this was not an inexpensive endeavor. It cost close to $20,000, but worth every penny for our plants.

When we made the commitment to cannabis, I needed a place to dry and cure the plants at the end of harvest. Fortunately, the house where we live has two small cottages apart from the main structure. One is for a washer and dryer. The other was empty. Initially, we made that cottage into a remote office for Karen to animate. We lived far enough from Pixar, that they allowed her to do some of her animation at home. I have a really cool story from that era that has nothing to do with gardening. 

Karen was working on Toy Story 2 at the time. She was animating a scene where Bo Peep kisses Buzz on the cheek of his helmet, before he goes off to search for Woody. Karen wanted some reference material for her animation, so she set up our video camera and asked me to play Buzz Lightyear while she played Bo Peep. We did about 60 takes. There was one that caught her eye, and a couple of weeks later, she showed me what she’d done. It was Buzz getting kissed by Bo Peep, of course, but I could tell by the way Buzz moved, and rocked back on his heels, THAT WAS ME. When I saw that scene in the theater for the first time it was one of the coolest things to ever happen in my life.

So, we had this cottage. It had not been Karen’s studio for a long time. It had become the proverbial storage shed. It was piled with stuff. We cleaned it out, and with guidance from one of my teachers, and a building contractor, we turned that little cottage into a multi-purpose growing/drying room. I start seeds there in spring and grow them for six weeks under lights before moving them to the beds. I also use that cottage over winter for pollinating plants for seeds. Then in the fall, we get all the strings on the walls and it becomes a temperature and humidity controlled drying room. Ideally, there would be a separate cottage for starting and/or growing, and another for drying and curing. But I’ve learned to adapt this one cottage for both. One more point for the cottage is that I hired an electrician to ideally set up the power. When you turn on grow lights, an air conditioner, a heater, a dehumidifier and fans in a small space, you’re running a lot of power. We had an electrician build a separate circuit board for that cottage alone, so as to not overly stress our main circuit, and to maximize efficiency in the cottage.

One last note about the importance of a good, efficient drying room: You have just spend six months working in your garden, growing the best possible medicine. You do not want to waste your work by not drying the plant properly.

In this post, you have read about the basic infrastructural work that went into what I’m doing now. We tapped into the water long before we started growing cannabis. We built our own beds and fence, but had to re-build the beds after ten years. Most of this work was contracted to professionals to be done correctly. You see we had an electrician come and change things for our most efficient use in the cottage. We had a drip irrigation system put into our beds and attached to our spring water. Everything is on a timer. All of these contracted events cost money. If you want to grow well for yourself and family, or professionally, it will require some level of monetary investment on your part. You can get by for a while, but eventually, you’re going to need to ante up and pay for a professional set up. It’s not cheap, unless you can do most of the contract work yourself. We were able to build our infrastructure slowly and incrementally over a period of years. Giving you costs for the above work is a bit misleading, because all the work was done at different times, different economies of scale apply, etc. It also probably cost me more to do this in California than it would for others living elsewhere.

In the next blog, we’ll go into further detail on costs, which are not insignificant when starting to grow. But if this is what you need to do, it’s best to know about these things on the front end and make your plans accordingly.

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