About

I am Simon Seidler, a regenerative grower from Hannover. Back in school, biology was the only subject I went to with any enthusiasm. Plant physiology and systems thinking still shape how I think about cultivation.

It was legalisation in Germany that first got me working with the cannabis plant. After my first grow it was clear that I wanted to carry on, and to do it as a volunteer in an association, to gather more experience. That is where I asked myself how what we were only just building in a small indoor operation transfers to an outdoor grow that has been running for decades. To understand that, I went to California for two seasons, to Sunrise Gardens in the Emerald Triangle. Not to copy techniques, but to see how someone thinks who has been growing for thirty years.

What I learned there was everything around the plant, from the morning walk-through to harvest. Above all, though, patience. With organic feeding nothing acts immediately; anyone who impatiently adds more makes it worse.

I already knew that idea from Buddhism: that the way does not lie at either extreme, but in the balance between them. Balance is the key word. In cultivation that is very concrete. Too much water, too little water. Too much nitrogen, too little. Intervening when you should have waited. There is rarely one right amount, there is a range, and finding it is the work. That is why I start the morning by looking, before I do anything. Not controlling, but understanding. I want to support the plant, not play God.

In practice I work with living soil, meaning soil that is built up over several cycles instead of being replaced after every harvest. I make the inputs largely myself, mostly following JADAM, a Korean method by Youngsang Cho. The basic idea: what a plant needs can be made from what grows locally anyway. I collect indigenous microorganisms in the forest instead of buying them in bottles. Plant ferments come from stinging nettle or whatever is at hand.

On most farms I have been to, animals live. Dogs, ducks, chickens, geese. That is not decoration, it is part of the system: they eat pests, keep the soil moving and bring in what would otherwise have to be bought. And they change the mood on a farm. A place where animals live works differently from a pure production area.

What I am working towards is simple: that more people grow regeneratively. Not because it is the purer method, but because it keeps running without inputs from outside. We are the only organism that knowingly destroys its own environment. So also the only one that can knowingly decide against it.