Meet Anthony Sarah. He’s the Tony in Tony’s Magic Mix, a fertilizer with a cult following that gardeners across Arizona swear by. He also owns Earth's Original Organics.
You can find his secret plant elixir at local nurseries all over Arizona, and he joined The Show to talk about how he came up with it. Turns out, gardening is in his blood.
Full conversation
ANTHONY SARAH: It started out as a high school job. My father had a nursery and I just started working in there to help him out and everything down in Tucson and just kind of grew from there and wasn't sure what to do and wandered around aimlessly, always working in the nursery, and if I wasn't fishing, I was out playing in the garden and so it grew on me over the years and. When it came time to go to the university, that's what I pursued, got a degree in horticulture and graduated with honors.
LAUREN GILGER: So, so you studied this, you have a degree in horticulture like you said. So, I mean, explain that to folks because this is like, I think a hobby for a lot of people, but when you study this, it's, it's pretty scientific, right?
SARAH: Oh, yes, very scientific, you're getting down into the nitty gritty. What people don't realize is a lot of what we've learned, like even genetics and everything, we learned from studying plants.
GILGER: Do you see sort of a connection between plants, between these kinds of living things and and us?
SARAH: Oh yes, yeah, I mean just like us, plants are as unique and different as you and I are. Little example, I got a few broccoli plants growing at our house in the garden, just sprouted seed. And there's about eight or nine plants in there, and one of them right in the middle, we dropped to 25 degrees at my house last week.
And out of all of them, only one plant froze. And it was the one right in the middle, so it was even somewhat sheltered by the other plants. And so it's what I try and tell everybody. You may buy five tomato plants and plant them all the same and think you're watering them the same, but they're as unique and different as you and I are. There's no two that are the same.
GILGER; That's really interesting. So you turned this into a business at some point. Was it the mix itself that, that sprouted that business for you?
SARAH: What started the whole thing is back when I started out in the nursery, we were still using chlorodyne and all the other really, really nasty chemicals were out. So I never really cared about organics one way or another. And then about 10 years ago, roughly, a lot of the organics started coming available in Arizona.
I was managing a nursery here in Tucson. And I said, OK, we're gonna be selling them. I got to sound intelligent talking to customers about them. So I took home all kinds of different ingredients, played around with them, had a bunch of stuff left over in a bucket, just dumped it, put it on the side. And little while later, needed the bucket, dumped everything out underneath my lemon tree, and my lemon tree just took off like amazing.
It just said, hey, I love whatever you just dumped on me, and I said, OK, here's what I might have had in there, and I started playing around with it and looking at it and looking at different ingredients. I said, well, what could I do that might be different? And if you're gonna do this, let's try and improve the health of the soil at the same time.
And I ended up converting myself from synthetics to organics. What organics do is they promote the beneficial bacteria and fungi in the soil. So think of probiotics for your guts. You get a good healthy soil biome, is what they call it, and this makes for better plants.
I had a, a good friend, God rest his soul, Rick Cober, who came up with a saying: “Happy roots make for happy shoots.” So I started looking at all the different organic ingredients out there. What were others doing? And I settled on bat guano as the base.
GILGER: And you have to explain to folks here what bat guano is. I have to stop you because I had to look it up.
SARAH: So bat guano is just a fancy way of saying manure, and so the difference between guano and manure is about $5 a pound.
GILGER: OK, OK. So bat guano is where you begin and then you started to add in lots of other things. I mean, but the, but the list of ingredients, and I know some of this is kind of proprietary, kind of a, kind of a secret, but you've got kelp meal, molasses, neems seed meal. Like it's, this is super specific stuff. How did you come up with what went into this mix?
SARAH: I started looking at it and researching it, so, OK, number one, we know kelp is already good, the potassium and there aren't a whole lot of sources to do potassium for organic. And kelp, you've got a lot of the minerals that also come from the ocean.
GILGER: So you, so you kind of zeroed in on this mix. At some point, although it took you a long time, it sounds like you had a big like 5 gallon bucket and you're just trying different formulas.
SARAH: I was playing in a 5 gallon bucket for a couple of years, giving out samples to all my customers, getting feedback from them. OK, that worked, didn't work, change this, up the amount, decrease the amount. They were telling me, hey, Tony, we finally think we got it. My plants are growing better, stronger, healthier. The fruit tastes better. I had several people tell me their tomatoes tasted better.
GILGER: So was it, was it about the ingredients that you put in there and, and what they do to the plant, or is it about the soil itself?
SARAH: Well, so it's making the soil biome, the beneficial bacteria and fungi, which makes the plants happy, you know, some of the ingredients. I never really been able to try and trace it down and I can't, can't, won't claim that you won't have insect issues, but I think what it is, there's ideas floating around that it leads to higher Brix levels in the in the plant.
Brix is the measure of the natural sugars in the plant. Another one is some of the, volcanic ash in there has silica. I think the silicates are making the foliage stronger and less palatable to the insects.
GILGER: So when did people start referring to it as Tony's Magic Mix? Like where did this name come from?
SARAH: So I went to everybody who was my guinea pigs. I said, great, you guys were my guinea pigs. You now get to name it. And so it was Tony's Pixie Dust. It was Tony's Fairy Dust. It was Tony's this. I said, look, I'm not trying to name it after myself. So, so it became Tony's Magic Mix.
GILGER: So I mean, having grown up at a nursery here, studied it, created this particular, you know, kind of mix with a cult following, right? Tell us what do you think is, is unique about gardening in Arizona and in the Southwest in general. Like this is not, it doesn't follow the normal kind of gardening or weather patterns that you would see like on the East Coast, for example.
SARAH: Well, so, number one, we have two seasons here. Most people aren't used to two seasons. We got warm and and cool seasons. So, you know, warm season is spring, and then you do what you can to keep some things alive through the summer.
And then this time of the year, in the fall through spring, you've got growing all kinds of root crops, lettuce, broccoli, cabbage, onions, garlic, all that stuff. So you're gardening here year-round. There's such a wide variety of what we can, what we can grow here, which is what makes us special and unique.
GILGER: So, for those folks who do not have a green thumb, who do not think that they can grow a garden, especially in the desert, what's your advice? Like, what do you think they should think about as they try this if they want to?
SARAH: The biggest thing is proper water. So you want to get very good soil, so get some really good quality compost, and don't be afraid to water. As an example, and my wife will hate me for this, our garden's 15 by 25 at the time, roughly. And she'd go out and spend 1520 minutes watering with the hose, and things are wilting again by the end of the day.
I'm growing everything full sun in Tucson, no shade. I'd come home from work. I'd go out and spend an hour watering the garden. 6:30 in the evening. And the next day at 5 o'clock in the afternoon, full sun, 105, 108 degrees out, nothing's wilting. You gotta really soak it.
GILGER: So let me ask you lastly, Tony, about just why you love this, right? Like this is your whole life. You've been doing this since you were a kid, it sounds like. I mean, what are you, what do you love about growing your own food? What do you love about teaching people how to do it themselves?
SARAH: It's just sharing the knowledge that God bestowed on me is, is, I think the biggest thing in watching people see and enjoy the fruits of their own labor. And, and of course enjoying my own stuff. I mean, walking out and picking a 30-pound watermelon from your garden and and having that for dinner, there's nothing, nothing better than that.