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I’ve got seeds germinating in the cottage right now. The grow is on.  I’ll start transplanting tomorrow, and it’s 41 days until plants go into my outdoor raised beds.

In the meantime, what do I already have in my garden? Am I doing anything else to prepare for the grow?

It’s been six weeks since we cut down about 1,100 fava plants and buried the cuttings under straw. Worms have been busy, eating the stalks and scatting the nitrogen into my growing mediums. So yesterday and today, we’re planting vegetables, because we don’t just grow cannabis around here.

A Czech Stupice tomato. Yesterday, we planted many tomatoes, eggplant, zucchini, cucumber, sugar snap peas, red peppers, sweet peppers , poblano peppers, jalapenos, lettuces, kale and chard. More to come.

But even before vegetables, there are plants growing in and around our beds right now that are part of our IPM (Integrated Pest Management) program. Plants are coming up in advance of our crop, which attract beneficial insects to our garden. Ideally, when we place plants into the ground on June 1, they will enter a garden that is fully active with both beneficial plants and insects, protecting our plants immediately in what could be a very hostile growing environment.

There are additional companion plants to add, once the cannabis arrives, things like marigolds, which can grow in a bed with a plant without taking too much nitrogen.

A companion plant that has risen in popularity among cannabis growers is the sunflower, and I agree that it is a magnet for both beneficial and predatory insects. It’s also beautiful to look at. However, do not plant a sunflower anywhere near a cannabis growing medium, because they are nitrogen hogs. They will deplete nitrogen from the growing medium at a much faster rate than a more diminutive merigold or chrysanthemum.

Here, we have a bed next door to cannabis that has both a sunflower seed plant growing, along with marigolds. So we dedicated a bed to companion plants next door to cannabis, and you see that the cannabis leaves are pristine. There is also a board separating the two growing mediums, so there is no nitrogen drain on the cannabis. 

But initially, what I’m talking about growing right now are the plants that are part of the permaculture of your garden. Plants you don’t have to think about planting. They just pop up, right on cue, when you need them. One of the things I advise new growers is to start planting permaculture plants in and around your garden. Variety is one of the signs of a truly healthy garden. After years of careful planting, we have key plants that begin doing their work well in advance of mine.

A very good place to develop a permaculture of beneficial plants is to have a spice row dedicated to flowers and spices that will naturally reproduce year after year. It requires weeding when things die and compost tea to produce a fantastic variety of recurring spices and flowers.

Oregano

Sage

Spanish, or Topped Lavender

Calendula, with some chives growing next door.

Icelandic poppies are extremely popular amongst the bees. Actually, all the insects do a happy dance inside this flower.

Lavender, ready to start blooming.

We grow lavender around the outside of the garden fence. Lavender is a deer deterrent. In fact, deer don’t like anything particularly aromatic, but lavender in particular, stops them in their tracks. We put lavender in because we love lavender, but we were also concerned that our fence might not be tall enough to prevent some big four point buck from just leaping over the fence and helping themselves to our garden. Deer are a garden menace.

But with lavender firmly established, we comically have a scat line outside the fence. You can see where the deer go to graze, but then go no further toward the lavender. There have even been times when the door to the beds was accidentally left open while deer were nearby and they still didn’t go into the beds. I would not trust that to continue for long, and a fence is absolutely necessary, but it was further proof that deer don’t like that smell.

One of the things we do before the lavender sprouts is clear out all the previous dead growth from above and below the new stalks. The plants appreciate this work, but the true beneficiaries are the local quail, who have their babies on the property, and then take glorious dirt baths beneath the lavender. I’m guessing our quail are the nicest smelling quail in our valley.

Flowering plants like borage and calendula are already up and in full flower. Plants like this not only attract beneficial predatory insects to the grow, they also attract insects that are not beneficial for your plants. For example, borage is a popular destination for aphids, which you do not want on your plants. Further, when aphids start landing on borage, ants notice and emerge from the loam to set a season long trap. They capture the aphids and herd them into a cluster from which they cannot escape. The ants then basically suck the juice from the plant, through the aphids. It’s a grizzly way to go, and eventually there will be a cluster of black aphid corpses on the borage. We have witnessed this more than once. Meanwhile, only inches away are flowering cannabis plants that the aphids never touch.

Borage–my personal favorite companion plant.

Here is a small borage just randomly coming up in a bed. They do this all season, because the plants drop seeds year round, and they won’t drain your plants of nitrogen, because their root structure is so shallow. It also makes them easy to remove, should you want to transplant one somewhere else. 

The goal in planting companion plants is to attract beneficial insects that help keep your garden free of harmful pests, and there are so many of them in an outdoor garden. The goal of controlling these pests is not that difficult, once the right strategies are employed. But without these aids, growing well is much more of a challenge.

If you read my blogs, you know that the fava plants are for nitrogen replacement, something growing mediums cannot do on their own. 

But what if you didn’t plant a nitrogen replacement plant over winter? What if you didn’t plant fish, or some other comprehensive fertilizer in your soil months before the grow? What if this is your first time? How do you stimulate your growing mediums to produce this year, without harming your soil for future years?

Begin brewing compost teas immediately, and pack them with nitrogen sources. Pack the green bag with nothing but young, growing plants bursting with the vegetative micronutrients key to effective growing. You might also get your hands on some fully dried Californian Brown Bat guano to brew with the tea, which is packed full of nitrogen and if properly dried, will not burn your plants, no matter how much you use. There are also additives like fish emulsion, which is basically pure nitrogen. Be warned–that stuff stinks. I primarily use fish emulsion in a tea, if I’ve had early flowering plants, and I need to shock them back into vegetative growing. Otherwise, approach nitrogen additives with caution. Too much nitrogen can burn young cannabis leaves.

A young plant with nitrogen burn. They’ll grow past this, as long as you don’t give them more nitrogen.

If you didn’t solarize your growing medium, now is the time to remove all old plant matter or debris leftover from last year’s grow. Because if you had any pathogenic problems last year, those problems are living on in the old plant material in your soil and those pathogens are just waiting to attach to your young plants. Rake and sweep. Put on your gloves and carefully remove bits of old roots, or plant tape, anything that could hold on to pathogens. It’s painstaking work.

Or, another thing you can do, if you didn’t do this last fall or over the winter, is you can solarize RIGHT NOW.  While it’s getting warmer, and your seeds are just getting started, you can completely purify your growing medium just before planting. Don’t worry, you won’t hurt the worms. When they feel the heat, they crawl deeper. But everything that lives within that first inch of soil, like all the mites that will harm your plants, will perish, and you’ll start your grow clean.

Cover your growing medium with clear, thick plastic that you can staple shut. Do not use black plastic, or you’ll destroy the microbiology of the soil. You want to preserve your soil, and kill everything else. If you solarize right now, you still have time to grow outdoors for a full season. If you wait much longer, the solarizing could impact the length of time you can grow, and you should wait.

When you uncover your growing medium, have a nice, nitrogen rich compost tea ready to pour, so that if the solarizing impacts your soil negatively in any way, you can immediately replenish and fortify your microbiology.

Lastly, if you haven’t taken stock, right now is when you need to replace anything you’ll need for the grow. You don’t want to wait until the middle of the growing season to buy products you need right then, because it’s possible those products will already be bought out. Make sure you’ve got enough molasses, humic acid, and especially materials for essential foliar sprays. At the start of the grow, you should have every tool you need at your fingertips. 

When I first started growing, I had an inventory of items to check and things to do. It was helpful, because there’s so much more to growing this plant than just putting her in the ground and running some water. 

Even my wife’s bent and crippled fingers like getting into the dirt. Get to growing!

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