As the heavy snowpack begins to disappear with some of the first warm days we’ve had since late December, it’s time to allow your imagination to dream of green grass, fragrant flowers and a more beautiful and functional landscape. If part or all of the landscape around your home is uninspired, overgrown or poorly arranged, begin now to envision how you’d really like your yard to look and feel.
Think about what you really want before you discourage yourself with budget concerns. When creating a plan don’t forget to incorporate an inviting outdoor living space , a place to recharge your batteries, and a place for the activities you and your family really enjoy.
Next figure out what actually installing these landscape features will cost you. If the costs are too high, decide how to implement the changes over a period of several years, to match your cash flows. If the costs are still too high, decide how you can change some expensive elements of the project to lower priced choices. By following this sequence, you are likely to still get the majority of the look and feel you envision.
If you feel you aren’t able to design your own landscape, our landscape designer would be able to help you with advice during a site visit consultation or even create a landscape plan for your property.
I am also sharing this post on my blog spot with the Northfield News.
Today – Sunday November 7th – is our last official retail sales day. Our perennials are already tucked away for winter, and we have started the over-wintering process on our production areas. Our retail shrubs will be available yet for a few more days until they too, will be covered up for winter protection.
We will still have a couple hundred potted trees available and our larger balled and burlapped trees should be available for most of November. Our crews can continue to plant these trees for you even with a couple of inches of frost in the ground. The trees have already gone dormant, so we can plant them and in the spring they wake up in their new home! Our larger in ground field trees will be available for most of November.
We have mulch – bags and bulk and cow manure compost still available for your late fall garden clean-up. Don’t forget the tree wraps for your trees. Our firewood bundles are ready to go and we are delivering orders for fireplace cords of firewood! Kristin Lucas, our designer, is still visiting with customers regarding their landscapes and will be doing design work all winter!
It shows how we plant a B&B (balled and burlapped) tree. These trees are larger and a little harder to plant than container trees, and it will show from start to finish how our crews plant them. Thanks to my webmaster, Griff Wigley, for getting this up on the website for me.
During our fall sale- we have exceptional buys now on our existing B&B inventory. You can hire us to plant these trees and put the fall sale savings toward the installation costs!
Today, we started the first phase of the landscape renovation to the building at 711 Division Street here in Northfield. The proud new owners of the building are Stan Hup and Kevin Rodgers of Northfield Insurance here in town.
This fall, we will be tearing out the existing landscaping around the building, and this winter, our landscape designer, Kristin Lucas, will be working with Stan and Kevin on a new look for the building. In the spring, the second phase of the landscape project will be completed. Shown to the right is our crew removing the privacy fences that were located in front of the office windows. Jim Westlund, Todd Marnie, Dan Parrott, and Luis Olave are a great team in moving this project forward!
Steve Schmidt Construction is doing the remodeling work on the building – getting it ready for the offices of Northfield Insurance.
Have you noticed here and there the beautiful white (and pink) blossoms on small (4′-9′ tall) trees over the last 5-6 weeks? You have probably been admiring the lovely mid to late summer blossoms of the hardy hydrangea trees.
The whole paniculata family of hydrangeas are exceptionally cold hardy, and are useful in the landscapes in both shrub form and also when carefully trained into small trees.
My wife and I are frequent visitors to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, which takes up to Ely, MN on a regular basis. I gained an awful lot of respect for hardy hydrangea trees when I noticed several large specimens growing in the front yards of homes in Ely, where -40 degrees temperatures occur almost every winter, and sometimes as low as -55 degrees. The trees were in full bloom in late July to late August and had to be 30-50 years old or more, judging from the trunks that were up to 6″ in diameter!
Little Lime Hydrangea™ is awesome! We have just taken these out of our production area as they are now ready for sales and they are “flying off the shelves” so to speak! New this year, they are from the Proven Winners line of plants and it is definitely a winner.
The dwarf version of Limelight Hydrangea, also in the Proven Winner lineup, it is one third the size which enables it to fit more easily into urban landscapes. Hardy to Zone 3 – you’ll be seeing many more of them in Minnesota in the years to come. The height and width of this plant is only 3′-4′ which will make it very versatile. The standability of these young shrubs is just amazing.
We just had a customer in this morning – coming all the way from the northern suburbs of the Twin Cities metro area because we were the only ones that had these plants. She had called all of the major garden centers in the metro area and came up empty on all counts. This is one of the areas that we are striving for is to have the plants that people are looking for. We stock the standard plants that are needed, but we try to reach out and get the new varieties and try some that have been around for a while, but not found commonly on the marketplace.
Our crew is continuing the landscaping makeover at the Quarterback Club here in Northfield. Our team of Jim Westlund and Todd Marnie are shown here putting in our landscape soil mix. Good soil is key to any project’s success. The plants will thrive in good soil. Once the soil is in, they will begin the planting of the shrubs and perennials. By tomorrow afternoon – a transformation will have taken place!
Other contractors that we have had work on this project are the folks at D & S Cement, Stanke Masonry, Oddette Welding Resources, DLC Irrigation and the sod will be the finishing touch and will be provided by Jirik Sod.
Early summer is an excellent time to plant trees, shrubs and perennials to make your landscape beautiful. Approximately 130 days remain in the growing season and this provides a long period of time for establishment of new root systems that will power vigorous growth for years to come.
The keys to success are: Good quality plant materials, proper site preparation that eliminates soil compaction in the areas where new roots will be growing, aggressive root pruning of any matted roots that have developed inside the container, avoiding planting too deep, and consistent watering that is just enough, but not too much. (most plant death we see is from over-watering)
At Knecht’s Nurseries we have developed our own new one page planting guide that gives the simple, easy to follow steps that you can follow to achieve summer planting success. Our experienced sales staff can help you select the right plants for your special site conditions. It’s available under our instructions page – just click and print!
We are well underway with tree planting for this landscape season. Jim Westlund, our landscape division manager, and Todd Marnie are planting an Autumn Blaze Maple along the boulevard for Evergreen Townhome Association. We have an incredible sale on our balled and burlapped trees from 2009 right now and even with hiring our crews to plant them for you – it’s still a tremendous bargain!
When we are hired to plant the trees for you – the only thing left for you to do is to keep it watered. We plant it, fertilize, stake and rope it if needed, and apply a layer of mulch.
If a larger tree is not in your budget – we have trees in small #1 containers all the way up to a #25 container, in addition to the larger balled and burlapped trees. We try to have a selection available to fit most any budget. For even larger trees- we do have hundreds of in-ground trees as well.
Check out our plant list for the many varieties of trees we carry – over 300 varieties. Stop in soon for the best selection!
We normally think of beautiful spring flowers as crocus, tulips, daffodils, flowering crabs, magnolias, plums, cherries and redbuds. One of my spring favorites is often overlooked.
Red Maple trees (Acer rubrum) quietly put on a wonderful show of beautiful red flowers each spring, long before their leaves emerge. Preferring mildly to strongly acidic soil, Red Maple trees and their popular hybrids push out early spring flowers that cover the canopy of the trees in a beautiful mantle of lacy red.
The spring color show generally lasts for one to two weeks, and depending on the way spring weather breaks, can begin at the end of March or as late as mid-April. Take time this early spring to enjoy the show put on by rubrum maples. The lovely spring color is a good reminder of the fantastic fall colors of yellow, orange, red and magenta that Red Maples give us every autumn.
I have also blogged this article on the Northfield News website.
Spring tree harvest is under way at the nursery. This means that if you have been thinking about moving some trees or shrubs around your property, the next 15 or 20 days will be your best opportunity of the year for most varieties.
If you are able to move plants before they leaf out, the buds that swell up after you transplant will send a hormonal signal to the cut roots to begin very rapid growth of tiny new roots out into the surrounding soil.
Make sure to dig your planting holes extra wide so the new roots will have plenty of soft soil through which they can penetrate. Avoid heavy packing of the soil you fill around your relocated plant. Waterings and rainfall will settle the soil just fine.
Your plants will be especially happy if you mix some slow release fertilizer into the backfill soil before you bank it in around the roots. Be sure to plant no deeper than the depth at which the plant was growing in its previous location. Remember – even though it’s not a “new” plant for you, it has been newly transplanted so you will need to water it all season as if it were a brand new plant.
You’ll find this blog also posted on the blog post for the Northfield News.
What’s so exciting about this picture? This is what the crabapples (berries) on our Red Jewel Flowering Crab are looking like today! March 17th! They are still a very bright red – with a few a little bleaker looking. What a fantastic tree! The Red Jewel is an ornamental tree that fits in smaller spaces. We have it planted right next to our front door, so going in and out all year we see it. In the spring, we are delighted with the white flowers while it is blooming, in the summer it sports the glossiest green leaves and mid fall, the apples start to turn a brilliant red which lasts all the way to spring. The name ‘Red Jewel’ promotes the color of the fruit and not the blossom.
It reaches a height of only 15′ and a width of 12′ – meaning 6′ in any direction. This enables you to plant it closer to either the house, deck, patio area – whatever you have which makes it the perfect tree for smaller places. The fruit is smaller – 1/2″ in diameter and is persistant. It hangs on all the way to spring (pictured) and will simply dry up and fall off when the tree starts it’s new growing cycle. Our tree is closer than 6′ to our house, and we know we will need to prune the back branches more frequently, but for the effect we wanted, we chose to plant it closer.
Spring is almost here and the crabapples will be blossoming before we know it! When you’re looking to plant a new ornamental tree – keep this little “jewel” in mind! We will be having a great selection of the Red Jewel available.
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!
Did you know that there are many new varieties of Elm trees now available that have very high resistance to Dutch Elm Diease? At long last, we will once again begin to see stately Elms offering the benefits of their rapid growth and cooling shade. Elms are fast growing trees that offer plenty of shade.
We have many varieties of the disease resistant Elms available including Danada Charm, Frontier, New Horizon, Princeton, Prospector, Triumph, Valley Forge and Vanguard. The two stand-outs on this list are the Princeton American Elm and New Horizon.
Princeton American Elm – a true American Elm with a classic elm vase-shape and large leathery foliage. The National Arboretum ranks the ‘Princeton’ Elm as one of the top American Elms that shows excellent disease resistance. When you purchase a ‘Princeton’ Elm ask for your “Owner Certificate” for planting an American Elm! 120 Princeton Elms were planted along Pennsylvania Avenue across from the White House – why not think of planting one at your house??
New Horizon Elm – This is an Elm hybrid with a compact growth habit and an upright form. It’s adaptable to a wide range of soils and is very tolerant of urban conditions.
The time period from mid-March to mid-April is especially good for pruning trees. With no leaves on the trees, it is much easier to evaluate the structure of the tree, choosing weakly attached branches for removal and leaving strongly attached branches to become the permanent framework. The next month is also a good time for pruning Oaks and Elms, since there is a far lower chance of infection of the pruning cuts to cause Oak Wilt and Dutch Elm disease, than during the warm season from may through mid-October.
Last April in my Blog Post, I discussed tree pruning — rather than re-writing another post – I am bringing it back this year. It is so relevant and after a long winter, everyone is anxious to get outside and get something done and pruning your trees might be on your list. The following is my blog post from April 15th of last year.
During late winter and early spring yards and gardens can often look their worst. The grass is brown and sometimes damaged by winter stress, pets, de-icing products leaking off sidewalks, driveways and streets, snow plows, squirrels, and even foot traffic. The tops of perennials that may have provided some winter interest are now tired and faded. Interesting shrubs, vines and ornamental trees such as Winterberry, Bittersweet, High bush Cranberry, Mtn. Ash and certain flowering crabs that displayed beautiful red fruits all winter long now have finally faded. Certain evergreen trees and shrubs show ugly browning foliage due to winter burn. Read More »
As the heavy snowpack begins to disappear with some of the first warm days we’ve had since late December, it’s time to allow your imagination to dream of green grass, fragrant flowers and a more beautiful and functional landscape. If part or all of the landscape around your home is uninspired, overgrown or poorly arranged, begin now to envision how you’d really like your yard to look and feel.
