Hortech is an innovative professionally managed Midwestern wholesale nursery, founded in 1983, which specializes in perennial plants; conventional perennials, labor saving ground covers, hardy ferns, climbing vines, and a broad array of ornamental grasses. Offering a palette of the finest native and non native species, Hortech is unique in that their plants are test grown in their trial garden and evaluated for hardiness, beauty, and sustainability. They resist the modern concept of rushing products to market to be first, whereby the consumer’s landscape becomes the trial garden. They would rather do their own testing so that when you purchase their plants, from Midwestern garden centers and landscapers, you will be satisfied with the results.
In addition to being dedicated horticultural professionals, they grow their plants in a unique manner utilizing the checks and balances of nature. Hortech was founded by a biologist, David MacKenzie, who maintains that plant culture should be a biological, not chemical, activity. The modern practice of showering plants with chemical cocktails, is not how plants are grown at Hortech. They feel that such practices would be like replacing your daily multi-vitamin with a handful of antibiotics. The very act of trying to ward off disease would suppress your immune system and make you susceptible to disease once the antibiotics are stopped. Likewise for plants; chemical cocktails of fungicides, antibiotics, insecticides, and miticides may appear to create plant health via disease avoidance, but they suppress the plants’ own natural defenses, and once the plant is in the consumer’s landscape it undergoes an inevitable “crash” that occurs when the chemical support is removed.
Hortech plants, which are Grown Earth Friendly, establish quickly and grow vigorously without undergoing chemical withdrawal–because of how they are grown, in concert with nature. Their objective is to always seek and implement biological and organic methods of plant culture whereby the plant is healthy due to the proper balance of nutrition, environment, and natural checks and balances. They have figured this out for the vast majority of the plants that they grow. To accomplish this, they use soil inoculants and compost tea to ward off root rot and other diseases, ladybugs to keep aphids in check, predatory mites to consume undesirable sap-feeding mites; predatory nematodes to control weevils, praying mantis to eat leaf eating insects, etc. There is a whole host of other natural checks and balances that we foster, and each contributes to the overall health of our plants and the environment in which we grow them.
Please visit their site http://www.grownearthfriendly.com/ or contact them directly at (616) 842-1392.
APLD - Michigan 