International Horticulture Technologies (IHORT)

Thank goodness for acronyms (IHORT), because answering the phones with “International Horticultural Technologies” is a real mouth full. We chose such a long name because it really describes what we do. We bring new technologies and development of new products worldwide for the horticultural, agricultural, building and construction industries.

IHORT works with the largest assortment of customers that you can imagine; greenhouses, nursery growers (containers), landscapers, agriculture, forestry, sugar cane, hydroponics, retail, growing kits, architects, governments, municipalities, contractors and new types of customers every day. In essence we work with anyone that wants to make a change and try something new in the way they are growing or marketing. What a wonderful job we have to be able to learn every day and to give and develop specialized products back to our customers.

In 1982 Gary Hartman developed and commercialized the use of Stabilized Growing Media (The Q Plug) for his own nurseries. This form of growing media solved the problems for automation, eliminated shipping and handling problems, and significantly enhanced the rooting of very difficult plants.

Today the Q Plugs and Excel Plugs are available for everyone in a large selection of sizes and shapes. Originally the growing mixes were designed for just rooting and transplanting, but now the media mix has been changed to enhance the actual growing of plants. We have included several natural biological products and other growing and disease prevention items to our everyday soil mixes. This technology is the result of three generations of experience and testing and is now incorporated in most of our plugs and soil products.

The development of IHORT’S open bottom growing trays has opened a whole new field of products and growing technologies. Twisted and curling roots have long been a problem of our industry, but with IHort's technologies twisting is no longer a problem. There has been a lot of discussions and products that have come into production to prevent twisted roots, but all of them I know of have all come from the ideas and technologies developed from one of Gary Hartman’s original poster’s submitted in 1985 to the AHS (American Horticultural Society) on the benefits and technology of air pruning.