Entering the gardens of Sun Roots Farm in Covelo in Mendocino County is like entering a botanical fever dream. Giant purple cannabis plants rule instead of humans, and weed flowers the size of buildings sway under the weight of their own colas. Below their sticky canopy, medicinal and edible companion plants twist, bloom, and communicate in soil alive with insects and mycelium.
This sungrown Eden is a place where cannabis is encouraged to express her wildest potential. According to Forrest Gauder and Patricia Vargas, the husband-and-wife team of regenerative farmers who founded Sun Roots in 2015, the less human intervention on this potential, the better.
“The plant has its own potential that is not influenced by humans,” Vargas said. “When it’s exposed to a multitude of beneficial components, such as high-quality soil, the energy of the sun and the moon, clean water, clean air, and the intention we put into caring for it, everything works in synchronicity.”
Sun Roots is a regenerative farm, meaning its practices are centered around healing and regenerating life on earth by improving soil health, bolstering native biodiversity, carbon sequestration (capturing and storing carbon dioxide to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere), water conservation, and enriching the health of the overall Covelo community.
High Times Magazine, April 2024
As opposed to the extractive farming practices often employed by cannabis farms, in which pesticides kill everything in proximity to the plants, poisoning the environment and sometimes even the consumer, regenerative agriculture uses a closed-loop system of cultivation that produces no waste and nurtures the environment while doing so.
While Vargas grew up in urban Connecticut and Gauder in the hills above Covelo, California a shared belief in the power of plants ultimately led them to one another.
Vargas’s ancestors were tobacco farmers from Puerto …
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Author: Lindsay MaHarry / High Times
