BLOG | WHY IT ALL STARTS WITH SOIL

**Assistant Grower Megan Housman On The Messiest, Most Vital Part Of Prūf Cultivar**

Humans have cultivated cannabis for thousands of years. Methods changed over time with the evolution of climate, terrain, and tools, most significantly affected by decades of criminal prosecution during the War on Drugs. The risk of serious jail time forced growers to move indoors, ushering in new lighting technologies and irrigation systems. Creating a clean indoor setup was not conducive to developing healthy soil for flower, and it was up to growers to concoct their own compost and nutrient recipes via trial and error, doing their best to give plants what they needed growing without real sun above or land below.

Now, as we are able to leave the underground and design facilities with the lessons learned from fifty years of indoor practices, Prūf has leaped at the opportunity to combine the best of all worlds: advanced organic crop production system, the best of rigorous science, and generational farming wisdom. That all starts with dream dirt we mix ourselves within our clean, indoor facility.

“Growing cannabis in media allows us to employ a Clean Green approach to plant nutrition and living soils to support unique phytochemistry,” says Megan Housman, an assistant grower at Prūf and resident soil nerd. “All of the components in our growing media are derived from natural raw materials, and we use techniques learned from organic composting and Bokashi—a composting method in Korean natural farming that promotes beneficial soil fungi.”

Prūf’s methods aim to mimic the best of what nature has to offer while keeping what’s best for humans in mind. While cannabis is the ultimate product, sustainability drives our approach to ideal growing conditions. The goal is a balance of what is optimal for plant expression and human consumption with what is practical for production. We mix our own media in-house to ensure quality and precision as we tailor each media mix for our specific cultivars and environments, each ingredient contributing to structure, macro- and micro-nutrient availability, pH stabilization, and/or microbiology. And no, we aren’t just being fancy when we say, “media.”

“We use the word media to distinguish what we use from mineral soils, which are characterized by a mix of organic matter, sand, silt, and clay. Our media, on the other hand, is characterized by a mix of peat, coir, perlite, and our blend of organic amendments,” says Housman. “But when we’re covered head to toe, we just call it ‘dirt.’”