Soil’s Crucial Role in Cannabis Cultivation: Mold and Pest Issues
As we prepare to publish our full Back to Basics: Soil’s Crucial Role in Cannabis Cultivation interview, let’s revisit some of the tips and insights from our cultivation experts, Adam Jacques, a world-renowned cannabis geneticist and Zacariah L. Hildenbrand, a research Professor at the University of Texas at El Paso.
Cannabis Science and Technology sat down with Adam Jacques and Zacariah Hildenbrand for a deep dive into cannabis cultivation and crucial role soil plays in your grow. Here we present a clip from this interview.
Watch the clip below for insights into mold and pest issues in soil, read the transcript below, and read more of this interview here.
Are certain types of soil more prone to mold and pest issues?
Adam Jacques: Types of soil, yes. Additives in the soil can cause issues. A lot of people put bark chip on the soil, which I would now recommend. Then it matters what you're doing with your soils. No till soil will build up heavy metals and a big one right now is Aspergillus, which people are getting in their living soils, no till style. So that is just bad input building up over time and then bioremediating into the plants. I would say that that's not great.
As far as like issues go, if you get a bag of soil, a lot of what I see is bagged soil companies are using municipal compost, which is fine as a thing, but generally municipal compost comes with all the problems of that area. Generally, that's fungus gnats. So when you use a bagged soil, especially indoors, you're going to see an influx of fungus gnats into your space. For us, we are constantly bioremediating with predator insects, so it's not a huge deal for us, but a lot of people bring bagged soil home, and all of a sudden they have an insect infestation of some sort. It's coming out of the bag from the municipal compost. So that can be an issue.
Zacariah Hildenbrand: Honestly, a healthy plant does better against pests and pathogens than an unhealthy plant. If you have this kind of crappy soil which has been amended with all this stuff – I just look at it as like the human body. If you eat garbage food, you don't exercise, you live a sedentary lifestyle, you just take all these pills to kind of maintain your health, you're still susceptible to getting sick. But if you eat properly and you exercise, you do all the right things, then you don't need to have all these additives. Even if you have propensity for some of these things based on the soil quality, if the plants are healthy because they're eating right and they're getting the right light, and there's proper drainage and all these other things, then they're going to be able to fight those infestations off much more readily than you know, a sickly plant.
