Visiting Tony Krock, agave grower extraordinaire
In October 2013, I wrote a post titled “ Coring agaves for propagation .” It recapped a demonstration agave expert Tony Krock gave at the 2013 Succulent Extravaganza at Succulent Gardens Nursery in Castroville, CA. Using a snake-tongue hand weeder (something like this) , he removed the core of an Agave desmetiana to induce the production of offsets. Tony’s demonstration was accompanied by audible gasps from the audience; this procedure does seem brutal, but it works. 9+ years later, I finally had the opportunity to visit Tony in Santa Barbara, and he brought up my original post. Apparently, people still contact him with questions about coring – amazing that one of my posts has such longevity! In the meantime, Tony has switched from coring to cutting, a different technique that produces similar results. I’ll come back to that at the end of this post. Tony and his wife Holly live on a quiet street in a residential neighborhood. Even without looking at my GPS, I knew I had arrived at t...