About
Long before I ever touched a cannabis plant, my path started in biology classrooms. Plant physiology and systems thinking still shape how I think about cultivation today.
When Germany legalized in 2024, I started my own homegrow, indoor and outdoor. Association work followed, and with it the question of how something that works at a small scale translates to a community.
To test that under real conditions, I went to California. Two seasons at Sunrise Gardens in the Emerald Triangle, under Frank Wilker, Emerald Cup winner 2023. Every phase of organic outdoor cultivation, under real climate, labour and compliance pressure.
What I learned most there wasn't in any cultivation plan. When a tree suddenly lies across the road, getting upset doesn't help. You accept the new situation, ask for help, and work with what's there. On a farm, patience isn't a character trait, it's a working requirement. That changed how I make decisions when conditions aren't ideal.
Today I'm Senior Grower and Head of Harvest at CAGH1 e.V., translating international field experience into compliant, community-based cultivation structures.
What drives me
Every farm I've worked on taught me the same lesson: nature already has the answers, we just have to stop overriding them.
Regenerative cultivation isn't one method among many to me. Ecologically, because natural systems already show us how. Ethically, because working with nature is the only approach that holds up long-term. Working against it only ever works short-term.
Just as important is the knowledge that carried these systems across generations. Traditional cultivation practices are disappearing faster than they're being documented. Once that knowledge is gone, no technology brings it back.
That's why I travel to local, often multi-generational growing cultures, to learn directly from the people who still carry it.
Two systems, seen from inside both
Germany legalized in 2024 through a model that barely exists elsewhere. Cannabis associations grow collectively for a fixed group of members, non-commercially, with documented inputs and a legal cap on size. There is no open market, no dispensary shelf, no anonymous buyer.
For someone coming from California that structure looks restrictive at first. In practice it produces conditions that small farms in Mendocino would recognise: limited scale, traceable inputs, and a direct relationship between the person growing and the person consuming. Structurally that is closer to small-appellation winemaking than to the commodity market California ended up with.
Most of what gets written about German cannabis is legal analysis. Very little describes what it is actually like to cultivate inside it. Having worked two seasons in the Emerald Triangle and now running harvest at a German association, that gap is the part I find most worth documenting.
How I work
Living soil means the soil is built across cycles instead of replaced after every harvest. You feed the biology, and the biology makes nutrients available. It takes longer and forgives less rushing, but it holds up over years.
Most inputs I make myself. JADAM is a Korean method developed by Youngsang Cho, built on a simple idea: what a plant needs can be made from what already grows on site. I collect indigenous microorganisms from the nearest forest instead of buying microbes in bottles. Plant ferments come from nettle, comfrey, or whatever is available.
Alongside that, biological pest management through diversity rather than products, and documentation, because in an organic system mistakes usually surface two weeks after they happen.
How far that approach goes, described through Walter Wood, who grows an entire season on under 60 dollars in bought inputs: Sol Spirit Farm, in German on CannabisBlog.eu
Where this comes from
I came to Buddhism because I recognized questions and answers there that I had already been asking myself. That's still the underlying attitude behind my work: not to control, but to understand. Not to play god, but to support.
In the field that means spending the first hour of the morning just looking, before doing anything. The plant shows you what it needs, if you give it time.
Available for consulting on regenerative cultivation. Inquiries welcome by email.
