German Regenerative Grower
Plants know their own balance. My job is to support them in it.
Two seasons at Sunrise Gardens in California's Emerald Triangle, today Senior Grower at a German cannabis association. In between a dozen farms, each with its own culture and way of working.
On this site I document what stays with me. Not how-tos, but observations: which systems work, why they work in one place and not in another, and what the people do who have been working with them for decades.
Why the location becomes visible in the result
There is a term from winemaking for my philosophy: terroir. It describes how a particular place leaves a signature in the product that cannot be copied elsewhere. Same cultivar, different slope, different result.
That holds not only for wine, but for every plant. Soil biology influences which nutrients a plant can take up at all. Microbial activity changes how it handles stress. The rhythm of fog, heat and cold nights shifts the formation of secondary metabolites. The same genetics gives measurably different results in two places.
Soil is not a substrate, it is a memory.
What can be measured of that, I put together here: Sun-Grown Cannabis Terroir on Research Gardens
Regenerative means working with what has been at your location for decades already
This is not purism, it is the difference between a system that feeds itself and one that hangs on a global supply chain. Anyone ordering microbes in bottles and having minerals shipped halfway around the world can work organically, but not regeneratively. A regenerative system has to keep running without those inputs. An operation can be certified one hundred percent organic and still start from zero every season. The ingredient list is right, the system behaviour stays the same.
Something follows from that which the method alone does not give you: every location has a different environment, and the plants worked with there are native to it. A farmer in Asia works with bamboo, one in Northern California with bay laurel, one in Germany with stinging nettle. These plants do not grow there by chance, they stand in a relationship to that soil and that climate which no bought-in product brings with it. So these are not variants of the same technique, they are different answers to the same question.
That is why I travel. Not to bring methods back, but to understand which answer a person has found in their own place.
The next place I want to understand
In October and November 2026 I am travelling for the Nepal Heritage Landrace Expedition. Four weeks through several regions, partly into valleys in the west of the country for which there is barely any usable map material online.
The work documents traditional cannabis populations, charas culture and the communities that have carried both for generations. A camera team is coming along. Some things cannot be written down, they have to be shown.
About
From biology class through California and back to Hannover.
Farm history
The farms, people and systems I learned from.
Publications
Articles and interviews on terroir, soil and regenerative cultivation.