We have a new landscape designer! John Oehlenschlager, along with our lead designer Kristin Lucas are both busy setting up appointments and booking landscape jobs! Check out our specials page – they are offering an early-bird discount for plans drawn before April 1st!
John comes with 24 years of experience – as a designer and a landscape installer! His specialty is hardscapes and we are very excited to have him on board!
Check out our Landscaping Page for more information on our design services! Even if you don’t need a landscape plan drawn up, our landscape consultations are a very valuable service! Give us a call and you can discuss your landscaping needs with Kristin or John!
Spring has arrived in the greenhouses! We have been planting perennial plugs for the last several days and the houses are filling up quickly. We’ll have the usual go-to perennials, but we have many of the newest releases coming this spring as well. I asked Heidi – our retail manager – what she was excited about so far in the ones that they have potted up, and she said the Jade Phlox and the Geums looked awesome, but the one she sounded most excited about was the Red Knee High Echinacea. A deep, deep pink color with a mature height of 24″ makes this an echinacea for use in front of the taller perennials or shrubs where a more compact plant is needed.
Our plant lists have all been updated with the plants available now in 2010, and our Plant Search has many of these plants on it and will be soon updated with many more.
February 19, 2010 – 7:59 am
Baptisia australis
The following article is being submitted by Heidi Brosseau – our retail manager.
I am so excited about the 2010 Perennial Plant Associations pick for Plant of the Year! Baptisia australis, aka False or Wild Indigo. This is one of my all time favorite perennials. It is a hardy native prairie perennial that has never let me down. It reappears each year as a strong, healthy shrub-like clump. Beautiful small blue-green leaves on sturdy stems end in tapered spikes of indigo-blue flowers in early summer. The showy flowers turn into green pods that kind of blend in until late summer and fall when they start to dry and turn black. That’s when this plant becomes interesting to children (big and small) because the dry pods rattle when you shake them. If you put this plant in a location where a stiff wind might stir it in late summer and early fall, then the False Indigo will rustle and rattle for you all on its own! Read More »
Yesterday, I spent a little time weeding the actual rows in my garden – after the rain those pesky weeds popped up, but it wasn’t a long and laborious task. The weed barrier fabric that I have in the garden provided a fairly dry place to work even though the soil was wet, and there weren’t weeds in the aisles to deal with. I tossed the weeds that I pulled into the middle of the aisle, and then took my broom and swept them up!
I harvested some onions and radishes, planted some more string beans, and Heidi and I planted some sun flower plants that we had started from seed this spring. They are already a few feet high and we look forward to the classic look of the sunflowers later this summer as well as a food source for all of the birds we have here at the nursery.
The first year (last year) of putting the landscape fabric down was a little work (and expense) to do, but it will last for us for several years and it makes the maintenance of the garden so much easier, from input to weed control and actual harvesting. As my cucumbers vine out, they stay on top of the fabric and you never have a cucumber that’s been laying in the dirt. I have it laid out in such a way that will make it easy to rotate my location for tomatos and peppers as well. If anyone wants to see how we actually have this laid out is welcome to stop by the nursery here and take a look.
Gary Powell, the wonderful addition to our retail staff this year, has shared his Rhubarb Dessert recipe with us – in addition to making it for the crew the past two Sundays. It is rhubarb season and you can never have too many recipes, right? My rhubarb patch here at the nursery is plentiful again this year and I have encouraged the employees to take and use what they can.
In the photo you will see Gary standing on an area of dead grass – this is my soon-to-be blueberry area. We will be amending with lots of soil mix and peat, and planting blueberries. We’ll have a few berries this year – but wait until next year!
Here’s Gary’s recipe – Enjoy!
Crust: 1 cup butter, 2 cups flour and 1/2 cup brown sugar. Mix all together as you would for a pie crust, pat out evenly into a 9 x 13 greased pan, bringing it up the sides 3/4 of an inch. Bake at 350 degrees for 10 minutes.
Filling: 6 egg yolks – well beaten, 1 cup cream, 2 cups white sugar, 1/2 tsp. salt, 1 tsp. vanilla, 2 tblsp. cornstarch, 5 cups of finely chopped rhubarb. Mis this together and pour over the hot, baked crust. Then bake 45 minutes at 350 degrees or until set in the middle. Cover with merinque.
Merinque: 6 egg whites – well beaten, 12 tblsp. of sugar, 1/4 tsp. salt, 1 tsp vanilla. Beat together well until stiff. Spread over filling and sprinkle with coconut or chipped almonds (optional). Bake 325 degrees until nicely browned.
April 26, 2009 – 12:07 pm
Monday, April 27th is Leif’s birthday. Last year, our grandsons came up to celebrate with Grandpa. Tyger is pictured here with Leif as he blows out his birthday candles.
On Monday, if you stop in and catch Leif – ask him for his birthday present to you – a birthday Gift Certificate for $5.
Happy Birthday, Leif.
April 23, 2009 – 12:43 pm
Gary Powell, our newest retail employee, celebrated his birthday today with all of us here at the nursery. Gary is retired from Northwest Airlines and lives in the southern metro. He has taken the course for becoming a Master Gardener and is also one of our certified employees under the Proven Winners Program. With lots to learn, he is proving to be a quick study.
Welcome Gary and Happy Birthday!
We are proud to announce that we are a 2009 Proven Winners Certified Garden Center. Through the iGarden program from Proven Winners, owners and employees are provided with plant selling tips, customer service tools and merchandising techniques to help them better serve consumers in helping them select and grow the right Proven Winners plant varieties for their individual gardening needs. Each of our retail salespeople took a test based on this material, and once we all successfully passed this test, we became certified.
Being a certified garden center enables us to better serve the customers regarding their plant choices and questions. If there are certain Proven Winner plants that you are specifically looking for – please contact us. We can’t carry every plant, but we would do our best to obtain requested plants.
March 29, 2009 – 11:39 am
Amy Voight, one of our landscape designers, and her husband Nathan, welcomed a new baby boy to their family on March 28, 2009. Timothy James Voight was also welcomed by his two older brothers – Caleb and Joshua. He is absolutely adorable. Little Timmy (as his brothers call him) will be keeping Mom busy for a little while, but Amy will soon be meeting with customers about their landscape questions and in helping them design a landscape just for them!
Congratulations, Amy & Nathan.
Now is a great time to start planning your beds for the spring of 2009! By now you know what did and didn’t work this season and you can also see what other people have done and how it’s doing. I can take full credit for very few combinations of annuals and perennials – most have been found by trial and error on my part or on the part of a fellow gardener. 
So, make those notes now, take those pictures, and let yourself start dreaming about those colors, textures and combinations that are yet to be.
Pictured here is a glorious Morning Glory. A blue that true will make anyone stop and take notice. It’s like the sky dropped a little piece of itself and it landed on our trellis. These Morning Glory vines may be annuals but they are wonderfully vigorous and fast growing climbers that can make quick work of a trellis or an arbor. This year we planted them on the same trellis as our porcelain vine so that the trellis would fill in more quickly but also to extend the bloom season.
(The above article was submitted by Heidi Gervais – our retail manager)
We have had the privilege again this year to donate plant materials to the Rice County Habitat for Humanity housing projects. Knecht’s Nurseries deeply appreciates the support of the greater Northfield area and has as a part of our mission to give something back to the community on an annual basis.
