Bass River Buds: What No-Till Living Soil Really Means At Bass River Buds with Evan Manaresi

Regenerative Roots

A South Jersey kid through and through, Evan grew up in the Pine Barrens, a rare and expansive ecosystem tucked between the beaches and the woods. It’s one of the largest remaining ecosystems of its kind, and the people who call it home are known for being resourceful, self-sufficient and deeply connected to the land.

“My dad was a gardener and fisherman. Growing up, we didn’t eat much that didn’t come from the garden or something he caught himself. He never bought inputs for the garden. Everything you don’t eat gets composted. He would put fish heads and seaweed into the garden and that’s what kept the garden going,” Evan says.

“As a teenager and young adult, I wasn’t very interested in gardening. But as I became more aware of what I was eating and the realities of the American industrial food supply, it started to matter more to me. We try to buy as much organic food as possible, but it gets expensive. Being able to grow your own food, especially in your own backyard, makes a real difference. It’s something I’ve grown to enjoy,” he explains.

Veggies To Cannabis

“I didn’t really start using cannabis until I was an adult. I got into it through curiosity, then through growing and it all clicked at once….I’m not a legacy operator, I never grew and sold flower but I had home grow for about three years leading up to Bass River Buds.”

When New Jersey announced adult-use micro cultivation licenses, Evan went all in, investing nearly everything into building a scaled homegrow operation with two 900 square feet grow rooms.

Today, Bass River Buds is just one of NJ’s few no-till living soil cultivations. It’s a tight-knit team of six made up of friends and family: Evan’s brother-in-law and mother-in-law, along with two longtime family friends he has known for years. One of his gardeners, Frank Camp, even used to help him tend his vegetable garden. “The people who I knew and trusted and who I already understood their work ethic were most important to me at the startup stage,” Evan explains.

Intentional Inputs

“There are lots of reasons I prefer our way of growing. We focus on almost every input we use in the garden. Many of them you could technically eat or drink, though I wouldn’t choose to, since they don’t smell or taste very good. They may not all be produced for human consumption, but they are biologically safe substances.

Aside from maybe a couple of cleaning products, everything is naturally sourced, coming from the earth, minerals in the earth, or biologically produced by a plant or animal. Those are the kinds of things I want in the food I consume and the flower I consume.

It’s incredibly hard to avoid chemicals and plastics in everyday life, so I try to be as intentional as possible with what I put in my body.

We produce great-quality flower that any cannabis consumer can appreciate, but especially those who are conscious about what they put in or on their body.”

How the Soil Keeps Up

According to Evan, no-till living soil is “just like regenerative outdoor gardening just brought inside. We have to use some more aggressive management tactics because we’re cropping over and over again. We don’t get seasons of rest like a regular outdoor farm. Outdoors, it’s easy to take soil samples at the end of the season or in late winter, then add amendments with plenty of time before spring.”

One way they combat this is through chasing ideals.

“We test our soil, we know what our ideals are, we make amendments we expect will bring us close, then we test again four to six weeks later and keep chasing those ideals. A typical outdoor regenerative gardener might make that change once a year. We’re doing it about once per harvest,” Evan explains.

“Our soil ends up a little heavier on nutrients and higher nutrient density than what an outdoor gardener would choose for a single-season crop. That just affects the targets and the frequency we have to work at,” he adds.

Care in Every Cut

“There’s something about happy, intentional, loving human interaction that makes the fruit from the plant better,” he says. “Cannabis is the same way.” That philosophy carries through to how the flower is handled at every stage, especially trimming.

“Hand trimming carefully is different than hand trimming,” Evan explains. At Bass River Buds, everyone on the team, including Evan himself, spends time trimming.

“Cannabis is a sensory experience: how it looks when you open the jar, the size of the nugs, the smell, the character of the strain. Hand trimming helps preserve all of that and we’re small enough to do it carefully without rushing.”

Why hand-trimming matters:

• Less handling, more intact flower Evan’s team trims flower by holding the stem instead of the bud itself, using the branch as a handle. By minimizing direct contact with the flower, they help preserve trichomes and keep the buds more intact throughout the trimming process. “That means less direct handling of the nug. If you look at a trimmer’s gloves at the end of the day after repeatedly touching flower, you’ll see trichomes and residue built up (aka finger hash or trim hash) and that’s material that should still be on the flower.”
• Not all strains are meant for machines Some sturdier strains with tighter bud structure can tolerate machine trimming with minimal damage or loss of trichomes. But most strains are simply too delicate.

Small Batch Partnerships

For Bass River Buds, intention doesn’t stop at cultivation. It extends to who they trust to with their flower. “When we first started, there weren’t many manufacturing partners doing things we were interested in. We also didn’t have the capacity to provide biomass for edibles, distillate, etc,” he says. “When we’ve sent fresh frozen to Onyx a few times for hash production and some cured material to Sun for resins, it’s come down to finding manufacturers whose product we liked, who are willing to run small batches and who are genuinely excited to work with us.”

Pennington’s Only Source

If you were lucky enough to get one of the 34 eighth of Ice Cream Cake, earlier this month, you experienced the only small, test batch of BRB’s ICC in New Jersey! Huge thank you to Evan Manaresi for choosing us for this special release…and exciting to let you know that more ICC is on its way!

“I really appreciate Pure Blossom and how enthusiastic you’ve been about me and our brands since we launched,” Evan shared. “You were one of our first retailers, and it’s been encouraging to see people latch onto our core strains (a team fave: Double Dipper) and want more and more of them. Really appreciate you guys and what you’re doing and caring about across your whole menu.”

Notes From The Grower

In their last delivery:

• Plasma 2.0 – A Rhode Island–bred strain from Down East Cultivation that really shows up aromatically. Expect loud grape and berry notes on both the nose and the taste. It’s indica-dominant, but not the kind that totally puts you down.
• GG4 – A classic cross of Chem’s Sister, Sour Dubb, and Chocolate Diesel. This run came out especially strong, with sweet, earthy aromas and a relaxing, mellow effect for melting away your stress, anxiety and pain.

Stay tuned for more Ice Cream Cake, new strain Blue Dream and some more old-school genetics that you don’t see much of in the market!

Note From Evan

The Bass River Buds team is probably one of the best customer service teams we’ve seen from an indie cultivator.

“Customer service and constant improvement are things that are kind of like very high values to me. So yeah, if the customers specifically, like, if you guys ever need anything, reach out on Instagram, send us an email. We care about your experience with our flower. At the moment, Instagram is literally a direct line to my phone. So if you reach out on Instagram, you’re talking to me. Thanks you for buying our flower and support us and making it so we can stay on the market and keep getting to do what we do.”