Many cannabis growers, especially beginners, are confused about terminology and types of root media for growing marijuana. Most solid root zone media brands sold to marijuana growers are defective. Today, we’re summarizing each type of root zone material, and explaining its plusses and minuses.

Growing Marijuana in Soil

This is in some ways the easiest marijuana growing method, especially for outdoor growing, but it’s not the most precise, safe, consistent, productive.

It’s very hard to get high-quality commercial soil. Most soil sold in grow shops has serious things wrong in its components, aeration, on-board nutrients, pH buffers, etc. and may contain fungus gnats and other pests built in.

One big problem is it’s easy to overwater soil, and soil takes a long time to dry out.

High quality soil is almost as expensive now as other grow media, and it’s very hard to find, but can be reused. When used properly, it produces acceptable quality and harvest weight yields with fewer technical problems and work than other types of marijuana growing systems.

Note that a major new marketing hype in the past ten years is the so-called “living soil” approach. Promoted by Gaia Green, Bio Diesel, and similar companies, the assertion is that you can purchase and/or create soil that has enough on-board nutrients and a robust beneficial microbes ecosystem so you rarely or never need to add nutrients.

While this approach sounds green and easy, in practice, it’s very unreliable and hard to dial in compared to growing marijuana in soilless mix, quality coco, or pure hydroponics water culture.

We contacted Gaia Green, The Soil Makers, Ithaca, Rolling Green, Bio Diesel and others to ask for test samples and third-party proof that their products work well for marijuana growing—their evasive responses was lacking in details, transparency, honesty. As you see in the next section, there’s a much better alternative to the “living soil” experiment.

Growing Marijuana in Soilless Mix

This is similar to growing in soil with two big differences: soilless mix usually doesn’t come with a long-lasting set of embedded nutrition, and it isn’t soil, it’s peat-based, engineered media.

Professional soilless mix has better water-holding, oxygenation, and porosity traits than soil, and gives the grower the ability to totally control the feed program.

Soilless mix can be reused, but over time the peat becomes water repellant. It’s generally more free of pests and soil diseases than soil is. However, peat-based mixes are created using environmentally damaging practices.

After decades of testing media, our magazine team universally agrees that Pro-Mix HP is the best root zone media for cannabis other than water culture.

Growing Marijuana In Rockwool or Coco Coir

Growing in a sterile, inert root zone media such as rockwool or coco is part of a large category of cannabis growing called hydroponic or hydroponics—words which indicate that the root zone doesn’t contain any nutrients except those delivered by nutrient-enriched water.

In this type of growing marijuana, growers have total control over the nutrients their plant get, and near total control over root zone pH. This helps growers push their plants to maximum growth rate and yield.

Only professional coco coir such as sold by California Coco, and professional rockwool by Grodan, are precision-engineered to have the right drainage, porosity, and other factors ideal for cannabis roots. Less expensive types of coco coir and rockwool have inferiority traits that harm your marijuana plants. Definitely avoid products featuring coco mixed with perlite or some other adulterant.

Unfortunately, even the best coco has problems, and you need a learning curve before you figure it out completely. If you get premium coco, have excellent nutrients made for coco, and professional pH/EC meter, coco can function like an inert media and produce decent results.

But before you first use coco coir or rockwool, get educated about watering. It’s very different than watering soil or soilless mix.

Coco coir can be reused, but it’s hard if not impossible to reuse rockwool.

Hydroponics marijuana growing is a more fragile situation than soil, especially if you rely on pumps and timers that can be sabotaged by power outages.

It’s imperative that growers have excellent pH and EC/parts per million meters, as well as scientifically-engineered hydroponics nutrients.

We have articles about high-quality hydroponics nutrients and grow op meters.

Please read them, as most brands of meters and nutrients suck.

Between the two, Grodan rockwool is far superior to coco.

Growing Marijuana in Deep Water Culture, Aeroponics & Nutrient Film Technique

Deep water culture hydroponic marijuana growing root zones are buckets or troughts nearly filled with nutrients/oxygen-enriched reverse osmosis water.

There is no solid root zone media, only liquid. The roots hang in the liquid and get all their oxygen and nutrition from it.

In aeroponics, marijuana roots dangle in tubes where each plant’s roots are periodically sprayed/misted with nutrients-enriched water.

In Nutrients Film Technique (NFT), cannabis roots grow in tubes or troughs. The roots pull nutrients from a film of water that runs along the bottom of the tube or trough.

These hydroponics systems offer even more oxygenation/nutrition growth and yield enhancement than growing hydroponically in coco coir or rockwool.

However, they generally cost more on initial start-up and to run. They are harder to run, require precision meters, dosing, and hydroponic nutrients, and are susceptible/vulnerable to water-borne diseases, equipment failure, and electricity outages.

For example, unless a grower has a backup generator, an electricity outage of even a few hours can kill a pure hydro crop.

Which System is Best for Your Growing Marijuana Style?

I’ve seen growers fail terribly or succeed wildly with all these types of cannabis growing.

No matter if you grow in soil, coco coir, rockwool, or in pure hydroponics such as deep water culture, each system presents its own unique set of benefits and challenges.

That’s why we don’t tell growers that soil is always easier or better than hydro or vice versa, but one thing is for sure: a properly-tuned pure hydro system definitely outperforms every other marijuana growing system in terms of growth rate and yield.

A main consideration is how much money and time you want to spend growing marijuana.

Hydroponic systems, nutrients and meters cost more than soil growing, and require more time and expertise…unless you have the money to buy a fully automated hydroponics system that reduces your workload to almost nothing.

On the other hand, hydroponic growing, especially pure hydroponics including hydroponic cloning, gives you faster growth rate, heavier and more potent harvests, and more crop cycles per year compared to soil growing.

Before you choose to get into growing marijuana or if you already have a marijuana garden and want to explore different system options, talk to an honest grow shop and visit it if possible, or look at YouTube videos, to see different systems.

We’ve grown in all the systems described above, and for indoor marijuana growing, our best results and easiest grow ops have been hydroponic growing marijuana systems that are drip-irrigated, fed recirculated hydroponic nutrients, using Grodan rockwool slabs.

The second-best results have been in Pro-Mix HP.

Growing in Fox Farm and other low-grade commercial media is usually a disaster, not worth the trouble, because those companies are greedy amateurs whose quality control is weak and stupid. Their products come with pests and diseases. Their products are full of sticks and other fillers.

Read this article–it explains why most products sold to marijuana growers are not professionally made or worth using.