No Till Kings is a Long Beach indoor grow that farms cannabis in permanent living soil and calls itself California's first indoor OCal-certified brand. Two friends brought together by skateboarding run it on a single specialty indoor license, capped at 5,000 square feet of canopy. The lineup: Boutique Flower, owner-picked Royal Reserve jars, hand-ground pre-rolls and 100mg Royal Refresher drinks.
Two San Diego friends and a Long Beach license
Jake Taylor and Marco Bruderer-Schwab are the owners of record for No Till Kings, LLC. The pair grew up in San Diego and met in fifth grade. Taylor was growing on the legacy market as early as high school, and it was Bruderer-Schwab who sold him on living soil.
They started growing in 2017, in California's Prop 215 medical era, and went legal in 2020. Taylor has said it took six to eight months after that to get product on a shelf. The company's specialty indoor cultivation license, issued in December 2019 with an adult-use designation, is active in 2026.
As of 2022 the company was self-funded, with the two founders holding 100% of it. It still runs owner-operated and intentionally small, and the founders frame the whole project around authenticity, quality and commitment to the plant.
How no-till works in their rooms
No-till is an agricultural method that barely disturbs the topsoil. Instead of dumping spent medium after a harvest, the team keeps feeding the same ecosystem with biological compost, and the soil in the rooms is more than five years old. Even the mother plants grow in it.
The cycle runs in four steps. Dead leaves and branches form a mulch layer on top. Earthworms break that material down into nutrient-rich castings while opening up airflow and drainage, and in 2022 each room started with roughly 40,000 of them. Bacteria, fungi, nematodes and protozoa break it down further, and fungal networks boost the nutrient exchange that follows. The loop feeds itself.
Nothing leaves the loop. Stalks, leaves and branches from harvested plants go back on the beds as mulch. The soil gets lab-tested twice during flower so the team knows which trace minerals to add, and some rooms have now run 12 cycles on the same soil.
What the OCal seal covers
Cannabis can't carry the USDA organic label, so California built OCal, a CDFA program for growers and distributors whose practices meet standards comparable to the National Organic Program. The state approved the program's regulations in 2021, and certification runs through registered certifying agents, currently CCOF and Envirocann.
Envirocann certified the No Till Kings flower operation on May 23, 2023, and CDFA's September 2026 registry lists that certification as active. Only certified operations can sell, label or represent their cannabis as OCal.
Boutique Flower and Royal Reserve
Boutique Flower comes in 3.5-gram jars from owner-inspected batches. Royal Reserve is the limited 3.5-gram tier, billed as low yield and maximum flavor, and it is the selection the owners pick for themselves. Taylor's case for the method is simple: you can taste the terps more.
The rotating menu leans on name breeders and a few classics:
- Black Patronus (RS-11 x Falcon-9), Neon Sunshine (Zkittlez x Falcon-9) and Plasma Gas (KushCo OG x Falcon-9), all bred by Exotic Genetix
- Jealousy from Seed Junky Genetics and Larry Strawberry from Jungle Boys
- GMO from Mamiko Seeds, Hash Burger from California Seed Bank, ZUNI from Raw Genetics and Mimosa from Symbiotic Genetics
- Jack the Ripper from Subcool's TGA Genetics and Lemon Banana Sherbet from Crockett Family Farms
- Classics including White Widow, Durban Poison, Blue Dream, Gelato 41, J1 and Jackapulco (J1 x Acapulco Gold x The One)
Pre-rolls and Royal Refreshers
The one-gram pre-rolls use whole flower, hand-ground with a Santa Cruz Shredder and rolled in RAW Black papers for less paper and more terps. Each one gets a hand inspection before it ships.
Royal Refreshers are the drink side of the lineup: 100mg THC beverages in Strawberry Açaí, Pineapple Guava and Mango Peach, made with less sugar and fewer calories. Weedmaps listings put each Refresher at $10, next to the flower and pre-rolls.
Small by design
The grow trades volume for soil. No Till Kings pulls four harvests a year where many indoor cultivators run five, all inside a 5,000-square-foot specialty indoor canopy in Los Angeles County.
As of 2022 the rooms ran on LED lighting, which draws about 25% less energy than HPS, with bamboo plant supports and jar lids made from reclaimed ocean plastic. Everything sells through licensed dispensaries in California.
For adults 21 and over.