As a Cannabis patient for over 25 years, and a soil building consultant for over 3 years, I have often pondered the question of “Can Cannabis grow on another planet?” Most of this quandary derives from seeing so many non-fertile spaces that humans believe will grow cannabis well, that are not biologically ready for hosting a plant that requires a rich soil diversity to thrive.

Sometimes speaking about soils, ponics ( pono-, pon-, -ponic, -ponics + (Greek: toil, labor, work hard, fatigue; exertion; also, suffering, pain) and other things concerning culturing like agri-culture, vermi-culture, permi-culture, and most other cultures which are forms of growing things from small amounts of microbes to larger amounts of microbes. Things like brewing teas containing thousands of microbes in colonies, as we are trying to reproduce natural existing colonies of “good” life, as well as contain roots in a productive environment like fabric pots, while feeding the soil life with non-synthetic ingredients whilst prohibiting pathogenic bacteria proliferation using Intraspecific competition.

These words also sound very alien to most home growers. Very much of my time in consultation is education of the barely known, both in product education and technique methodology. This has produced a rather useful glossary of terms, and standard operating procedures (S.O.P’s) for different steps of culturing nature.

Sharing these steps in culturing nature, which are like most techniques in life, is an acquired venture into the unknown. Publishing fact vs. fiction always has room for improvement, and that is the goal here as well. The goal is to improve on modular systems that could help humans grow food on other planets or in some cases our back yards.

In developing We Grow Live there are several areas of modular automated enclosed gardens that parallel with potentially growing food on Mars or in outer space. Growing in food deserts is a mighty task which would usually require using animals in agriculture to develop soils that allows for geoponic development for food production. Bringing cows into space is not an option on our current space craft.

Modern agriculture has been the opposite of what the earth needs for ideal sustainability. Tilling and synthetic salt based “nutrients” have created a desert of sorts by killing off soil life necessary to create food and store water in non-conventional soil structures. This soil death is very much like the surfaces of planets in our solar system. We should NOT replicate modern agriculture on this planet, much less a newly colonized one.

This space on the internet is to discuss growing methods in inhospitable habitats.