Three organic growing philosophies come up again and again among growers, and they disagree with each other on real questions — whether to use liquid feeds at all, whether to correct pH, how long a substrate lasts, and how much of the work happens in the soil versus in the schedule. This article is the navigation piece: what each school actually holds, where they agree, where they genuinely conflict, and how to choose between them by the scale you are operating at rather than by which one sounds most appealing.
1. The three schools in one line each
True Living Organics (TLO). Build an extremely biologically active container soil, feed the microbes rather than the plant, place concentrated dry amendments in defined locations the roots grow into, and recycle the same soil indefinitely. Liquid inputs are treated as a threat.
Soma’s organic method. Build a rich organic substrate that carries most of the fertility, feed lightly and late with an organic tea and a low-analysis bloom nutrient, actively manage water pH, and replace a third of the substrate every cycle.
Classic no-till living soil. Build a living soil in a bed or large container and never disturb it — no transplanting, no soil replacement. Fertility is rebuilt from the top with amendments, mulch and cover crops, and the undisturbed fungal network is treated as the asset.
2. Where they agree — and this is the more important half
The two source books agree on the points below, and the no-till literature is broadly consistent with them:
No mineral salts, in any form. All three treat synthetic salt fertilisers as incompatible with the method. TLO is the most emphatic — its position is that organic acids damage the biology but the soil recovers, while mineral salts keep suppressing and killing it, and a pot that has received them is finished for that cycle.
Grow from your own seed or cuttings. Both source books independently identify imported cuttings as the main route by which powdery mildew, spider mites, aphids, thrips and viruses enter a garden. This is the single highest-value practice they share.
Aeration is the constraint in a container. Perlite at 20–25% of pot volume in TLO; heavy perlite plus a LECA base and vertical air pipes in Soma’s beds. Both identify waterlogged, oxygen-poor substrate as the leading cause of root death.
Slow drying, careful curing, harvest by the plant not the calendar. Both books call harvesting too early the most common grower error, and both give the same trichome-based criterion.
Water quality is part of the fertiliser programme. TLO adjusts its recycling recipe’s lime and shell load by source-water PPM; Soma corrects pH before every irrigation. Neither treats water as neutral.
Where the five points above overlap, you are on solid ground regardless of which school you follow.
3. Where they genuinely conflict
These are real disagreements, not different words for the same thing.
| Question | TLO | Soma | No-till |
|---|---|---|---|
| Liquid organic feeds | Almost never. Organic acids cause an abrupt pH shift the microbes cannot adapt to | Yes — guano tea twice weekly weeks 4–7, plus a low-analysis bloom nutrient | Minimal; teas used, bottled feeds generally avoided |
| pH correction of water | Discouraged — adding acids is the problem | Yes — citric acid to pH 6.0 before every watering | Generally not; the soil buffers |
| Substrate lifespan | Indefinite, with a full amendment and cure programme | 3 cycles, replacing ⅓ each time | Indefinite, never disturbed |
| Where fertility is added | Core-feed holes + floor and top layers + teas | Blended through the substrate at mixing, then teas | Top-dressed onto the surface |
| Transplanting | Yes, and coring happens at the final transplant | Yes, into the bed | No — the whole point |
| Complexity | High — ~20 amendments, 30-day cure | Low–medium — 8 ingredients, no cure | Medium — high initial build, low ongoing |
| Ongoing effort | Medium | Low–medium | Low |
| Input cost over time | Lowest — soil is recycled | Medium — ⅓ replaced each cycle | Lowest |
| Target soil pH | 6.2+ for recycled batches | Substrate buffered to 7, root zone 6.2–6.6 | ~6.5 |
The liquid-feed disagreement is the substantive one. TLO’s position is that any liquid organic fertiliser with significant humic, fulvic, phosphoric or citric acid content shocks the microbial population. Soma waters citric-acid-corrected tea onto his beds twice a week and reports good results from it.
Both cannot be right in the same system — and they are not in the same system. Soma’s substrate is a well-fertilised organic mix; TLO’s is a deliberately supercharged microbial ecosystem where the biology is the delivery mechanism. The more your system depends on the biology, the more a liquid acid input costs you. That is the reconciliation, and it tells you which risk applies to your setup.
The pH disagreement resolves the same way. In a heavily buffered living soil you should not need to correct water pH, and correcting it with acid is a net negative. In a bagged-substrate system fed with pH 8.3 tap water, correcting is straightforwardly sensible.
4. Choosing by scale
Personal grow, 1–4 plants, small space
Recommended: the minimal living soil recipe, or Soma’s substrate.
Four ingredients, no curing, used the same day, bigger pots to compensate. It gets you into organic growing without twenty amendments, a compost tumbler and a worm bin.
Why not full TLO: the amendment list, the curing space and the recycling bins are a real commitment for four plants. Why not no-till: it needs a bed or a very large container, and its advantages compound over years.
Upgrade path: add a worm bin → start recycling → move to the full core-feed recipes → add teas. Each step is independent.
Serious hobby, 5–20 plants, dedicated room
Recommended: full TLO, or no-till if you have the bed space.
At this scale the economics change. Recycling the same soil for years genuinely saves money, the worm bin has enough input to be worth running, and core feeding earns its place because you are flowering in containers small enough to need it.
TLO’s own pot-size rule matters here: at 400 W, 13.25 L or larger is the threshold for a genuinely water-only grow using only layering and coring. Below that, expect to core-feed and brew teas.
Choose no-till instead if: you can build a bed, you intend to stay in the same space for years, and you prefer low ongoing labour to low initial labour.
Small commercial, GACP-oriented
Recommended: Soma’s model, or a documented hybrid.
The reason is documentation, not agronomy. A GACP system requires every input recorded — what, how much, when, from which batch, applied by whom. Soma’s method has a short input list and a defined schedule, which is straightforward to document. TLO’s twenty-ingredient recycling recipe with variable curing and a worm bin is a harder system to evidence.
Biological inputs are the audit risk in every school. Bat guano, manure, compost and worm castings can carry pathogens and heavy metals, and under Thai GACP each one needs a documented source plus pathogen and heavy-metal test results or composting/treatment records. That applies to the guano tea in Soma’s model just as much as to TLO’s worm bin: a short input list only helps if every item on it, guano included, is documented to the same standard.
This is not a criticism of TLO’s results. It is a statement that auditability and biological complexity pull in opposite directions, and in a regulated supply chain auditability wins.
The hybrid that works: Soma’s documented substrate recipe and feeding schedule, with the aeration and drainage engineering from TLO — the perlite percentage discipline, the six-month aeration check, and the water-PPM adjustment logic.
Larger commercial
Neither book is written for this scale, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. What transfers:
- The substrate-as-reservoir principle, which reduces feeding operations.
- The input-provenance discipline, which is a GACP requirement anyway.
- The no-till outdoor model — composting in place, leaving roots to decompose into channels for the next crop — which is genuinely scalable and is the lowest-labour approach of the three.
5. Choosing by climate — the Southeast Asian filter
All three schools were developed mainly in temperate climates. Four adjustments apply regardless of which you choose:
Faster mineralisation. Incubation studies of high-nitrogen organic fertilisers such as blood meal and feather meal report roughly half of the organic nitrogen released within weeks at warm temperatures, and release speeds up as temperature rises. Every schedule in these books will run faster in a 30 °C room. Expect earlier fade; plan top-dressing as routine rather than as rescue.
Faster curing. TLO’s 30-day cure is a temperate-climate figure. Test with a soil pH meter — the mix’s pH rises as it finishes — rather than counting days.
Humidity is the dominant disease risk. All three schools converge on the same instruction: clear the lower canopy, run below-canopy airflow, and reduce water in the final weeks. In this region that is not fine-tuning, it is the primary crop protection.
Sourcing inverts. Coco coir, oyster shell, rice husk, bat guano and volcanic rock dust are all regionally produced and cheap here. Blood meal, feather meal, greensand and European bagged substrates are imports. A locally built substrate is often the better economics here, and both books’ recipes substitute by function rather than by brand.
6. What we would actually do
Stating a view, since laying out three options without one is unhelpful:
Start with the minimal recipe. It is the cheapest way to find out whether organic growing suits you, and it is a genuine first step of the full method rather than a lesser version.
Add a worm bin early — with a locally appropriate species (Perionyx excavatus or Eudrilus eugeniae rather than Eisenia fetida, which merely survives at tropical temperatures rather than thriving). The quality of every one of these systems depends on the castings.
Then choose your direction by container: if you are in pots, go toward full TLO recycling; if you can build a bed, go toward no-till.
Take the engineering from TLO regardless of which school you follow — the perlite percentage, the six-month aeration check, the source-water PPM adjustment. Those are the parts of that book that are transferable rather than philosophical.
Take the discipline from Soma regardless — a written feeding schedule, a defined stop point for nitrogen, and the flush weeks. Those are what make a system reproducible.
And be sceptical of the quality claims from all three. Every organic source here claims better flavour and effect than mineral-fed cannabis. We could not find controlled sensory or analytical work testing it. The argument that clearly survives checking is the substrate-health one. The residue argument is narrower than it sounds: avoiding synthetic pesticides and salts removes some residue sources, but organic is not the same as residue-free. Guano, manure and compost can bring in heavy metals and pathogens, and where release testing applies, the finished product is tested whatever the inputs were.
Which of these have people here actually run for more than a year, and what made you switch — or not? Every one of these methods reads well on paper. The question none of the books answer is which one people are still using in year three, and why the others were abandoned. That is the comparison that would actually help someone choosing.
Related reading: the no-till living soil article (topic 1091); the True Living Organics series (soil build, recycling, core feeding, teas, minerals, water, troubleshooting); the Soma series (raised bed, feeding schedule, supercropping, pest control).
This article is technical horticultural information for readers operating legally in their jurisdiction. Cannabis cultivation is regulated differently in every country. In Thailand, cannabis is a controlled herb under the Notification of the Ministry of Public Health Re: Controlled Herbs (Cannabis) B.E. 2568, and cultivation requires the applicable permit. The Cannabis Control Act is still a draft: the Cabinet approved it on 22/09/2026 and sent it to the House. Nothing here is legal advice.