Tony Avent runs the wonderful Plant Delights Nursery - offering a diverse collection of plants and the catalog is a collectors' item On April 29, 2010 Anne Raver of the New York Times asked: "How does Tony Avent , the horticultural mythbuster, grow so many plants successfully in his garden? Rule No. 1: he uses the same mix of 40 percent native soil, dug on his own land, and 60 percent compost for every plant. ''The soil for every plant we have is prepared exactly the same, whether it's a pitcher plant or an agave,'' .... After he switched to organics, he said, ''it took about a year before everything started jumping. Our insect problems disappeared. It was just amazing.'' ...." This observation took me back to 1972 when I was a landscape architecture student at the University of Hawaii and minoring in tropical agriculture The university farm was in Pearl City ( next to Pearl Harbor) and it was divided int...
