GROWING EXPOSED DOWN UNDER: THE BYRON HINTERLAND’S LIVING SOIL

Superbly Green on Growing Exposed. Hit play to take the tour.

When the Canadian team from Growing Exposed came to Australia, they came looking for heritage and craft.

That search took them straight to the Northern Rivers in NSW. Superbly Green, a Byron Hinterland farm growing the natural way.

What follows is a full walk through of the facility. The beds, the compost heap, trim jail and even the bug hotels. And the thing the crew keeps coming back to is that none of this is the only way to grow good weed, it’s just the way Superbly has chosen.

It’s All in the Dirt

So what puts this little farm on the world stage? It starts with the dirt. Nutrient rich red volcanic soil formed by eruptions roughly 23 million years ago.

Plenty of good quality weed is grown hydroponically, dialled in on precise nutrient mixes. The farm’s founder, Joel, just went the other way after years of buying and smoking organically grown flower out of this region, telling the crew organic cannabis simply agreed with him better.

So Superbly Green runs entirely on living soil and hand watering.

If living soil’s new to you, it’s pretty much what it says: a living ecosystem packed with microbes, earthworms and fungi.

The red dirt does half the job on its own. Andy, the farm’s head agronomist, describes it as mineral-rich, sitting at around 15% iron, but naturally low in biology. Marrying that mineral content with the biology they grow themselves is where the magic comes from. More on that shortly.

The plant calls its own shots, pulling what it wants when it wants it.

Feeding itself off healthy soil lets the plant show its full genetic potential, the deep terpene profiles and big aromas that come from a plant taking its time.

Keeping that soil alive is a daily job.

The Compost Pile Is the Engine Room

Everything the farm cuts off a plant ends up back in the dirt. Old stalks, leaves, all of it goes onto the compost heap and comes back as the food for the next run. A closed loop.

It’s not a heap left in a corner, either.

Early on it’s turned almost daily to keep oxygen in it, it sits hot enough to steam. Six days in it already looks like dirt.

Start to finish takes anywhere from six to twelve weeks, and they know it’s done when a turn no longer makes it steam up.

Then it goes out the low-tech way, wheelbarrows and shovels, top-dressed across the beds rather than swapping the beds out. And as Andy points out, the point isn’t only the nutrition, it’s the inoculation, getting that biology back into the soil.

Bottled microbes have their place, he reckons, but nothing gets you the range that comes out of a system like this.

Nature already worked it out, and the farm’s job is just to work with it and hurry it along a bit.

Bugs, Herbs and Balance

Walk into the greenhouse and there’s stuff growing that isn’t cannabis. Coriander, purple basil, dill, lavender, thyme, oregano, mint. It looks like someone’s kitchen garden got loose in there.

That’s the companion planting, and it’s doing a job. Those herbs are a permanent home for the beneficial insects the farm releases, feeding them nectar and providing them with those bug hotels when a run is harvested. On a crop that turns over every couple of months, the bugs need somewhere to live when the flower comes down.

The upshot is a garden that polices itself. Instead of reaching for harsh insecticides, they’ve colonised the good bugs and let them handle the bad ones.

Hinterland History and Good Genetics

You can’t talk about the Byron Hinterland without talking about its history. People have been growing here for the better part of 70 years. Joel doesn’t dance around it, calling the area the mecca of cannabis and the original OG growing region in this country.

This is Mardi-Grass country. It’s where the legendary Mullumbimby Madness was hunted.

The farm’s in-house breeding program leans right into that heritage, and so does its hiring. They work with people from all over who’ve got organic growing experience in these hills, which is a polite way of saying the region’s old knowledge is still in the room.

They’ve hung onto some genuinely old genetics, too, including sativas throwing terp profiles you don’t see in the modern stuff. One of them, a papaya guava cross, grows sideways and drives the pruning crew mad but absolutely loves the climate.

Out here the sun and the season already do the job, and these plants have been thriving in this valley for decades. No need to reinvent the wheel.

Craft Above All Else

Growing a great plant is only half the job, though. What happens after harvest counts just as much.

It’s dried for 14 days and cured for 28, with the totes burped and mixed every three days on a rotation so the gases can get out. No shortcuts, just letting the flower be what it’s meant to be.

Everything is then hand-trimmed. Not just the top-shelf flower, the smalls too. Joel’s take is that it’s simply what everyone has worked out is best: you end up with more of it and it’s better.

It’s slow and it’s a lot of people, but that’s the trade.

Why Homegrown Hits Different

The feature also backs up something local heads have been banging on about for years: Aussie-grown matters.

Homegrown means fresher flower. And just as importantly, it keeps the money and the skilled growing jobs right here at home.

It helps that the farm never really stops. They take around 2,000 clones a fortnight across seven separate compartments, so something’s always coming down and something’s always going in.

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