Heidi Brosseau – our retail manager – has selected all varieties of the perennial Coreopsis as the perennial pick of the week for a 10% discount. We have many varieties that are blooming right now and looking absolutely gorgeous. Stop in and pick one up for your perennial garden!
Strawberries and Rhubarb go together. How many recipes don’t we all have with this combination? Strawberries and Bananas – another hit… but have you tried Rhubarb and Bananas???? The following pie recipe comes from the recipe file of Leonard and Marie DeWolfe. Marie passed on but Leonard still shares the recipe. The sweetness of the banana cuts through the tartness of the rhubarb and is surprisingly very good! Enjoy!
Rhubarb Banana Pie
Heat oven to 425. Prepare pie crust for a double crust pie.
Trim 1 1/2 pounds of fresh rhubarb and cut into 1/2″ slices. Mix with 1 1/3 c. sugar, 3 Tbsp. quick cook tapioca, 1 tsp. grated lemon rind and 1/4 tsp salt. Slice a large peeled banana over pastry in pie pan, top with rhubarb mixture. Dot with 2 tbsp. butter. Put top crust on. Bake 35-40 minutes until crust nicely browns.
Hosta – Guardian Angel (left) Hosta – montana Aure0-marginata (right)
These are probably my two favorite hosta plants. Guardian Angel – will become a large plant – almost three feet high and approximately four feet wide. A sport of Hosta Blue Angel – it’s multi-hew coloration is a show stopper. Plant other blue hostas or shade perennials around Guardian Angel and they will be the perfect complement to this exceptional hosta.
Hosta montana Aureo-marginata is a vigorous grower and lightens up any shade garden. It’s also a large hosta and as is pictured here- makes a nice surround underneath a tree. This shows a crabapple tree planted in a raised bed, with three montana Aureo-marginata around it and then a planting of shade annuals in a ring.
Get creative with your hosta plantings! Stop in and look at our many different varieties that we offer. We have over 150 different hosta varieties for sale here at the nursery! (Some hard to find ones included.)
March 17, 2010 – 11:29 am
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.
January 21, 2010 – 7:46 am
January 19th brought amazingly beautiful hoar frost to our humble little office. Despite all the white – we’re thinking Spring! The days are getting longer, the sun is getting stronger and before you know it – the snowbanks will be melting. Now is the time to start thinking about plans to improve your landscape in 2010. Our designer, Kristin Lucas, is able during this winter period to help you with planning for a real special look and feel for a part or all of your home landscape!
November 18, 2009 – 6:20 am
We have closed the retail center now for the winter. We do still have available about 200 potted trees and all of our larger balled and burlapped trees until there has been enough frost to freeze things up! We will have dry firewood and gift certificates all through the winter season!
For the balance of November – our hours are 8 am to 4 pm Monday through Friday. We will be closed for the 4 day Thanksgiving holiday. Starting in December, we will be here Monday through Friday – in the mornings – from 8 am to noon! We do check messages and e-mail several times a day so we can get back to you usually the same day!
November 18, 2009 – 6:03 am
We have gift certificates available for your holiday gift giving. We can issue them in any amount you need. Our office hours this time of year are limited, but we can mail them to you, to the recipient or arrange a time for you to pick it up if it’s not a time when we’re open! We try to be as flexible as we can!
Gift certificates for trees are especially nice since it allows the recipient to pick out just the tree for them! Some people love flowering crabs – while others love oaks, and the next person really likes the colorful maples. With thousands of trees to choose from they’ll surely find just the right tree for them!
Gift certificates are great for using toward spring annuals and hanging baskets or even toward visits by our Landscape Designer! Give us a call and we’ll assist you with your holiday shopping!
November 9, 2009 – 2:23 pm
With the wonderful November weather – we are staying open for at least another week! People have been coming in and purchasing plant materials – others are hiring us to plant for them – and one couple contracted for a patio yet this fall – we’re still going strong! The fall sale prices are great and if you’re thinking of doing some projects – take advantage of the fall sale prices!
Our hours have changed just a little – with the time change we are closing now at 5 pm during the week, and Saturday we will be here from 8 to 5, and next Sunday – 10 until 4.
October 20, 2009 – 7:39 am
Now – my favorite subject! Hosta!
The past two days (which were really nice!) were sort of depressing for me. I had the task of cutting back all of our production hosta plants here at the nursery – signaling the end of this growing season. Sunday night we walked through our hosta garden at home, and then while cutting the plants here back – I once again was prompted of the excellent attributes of a few of these incredible plants!
Paul’s Glory – in the picture here it’s the hosta that is directly behind the pink impatiens. It’s a wonderful hosta variety. It’s considered a large hosta and has multi-colored leaves that provide very good substance. The thing that makes this a true winner in the hosta world is that after all of the hard frosts that we’ve had now in October, it still was holding up better than almost all of the other ones. The color had changed a little bit to a mellower yellow – but was still beautiful. From May – until almost November – you can enjoy this plant! Others that impressed me by making it through such heavy frosts without looking really tired – were Diana Remembered, Summer Breeze, many of my blue varieties, Guardian Angel and some of the traditional varieties. We have over 400 varieties of hosta in our gardens at home so it’s hard to even come close to picking a favorite but I must say that Paul’s Glory is right up in the top 10!
Hosta are such tough plants – so easy to grow and provide beauty and interest all during the spring, summer & fall. You can still plant hosta so they’ll be ready to emerge in the spring and become part of your landscape! Years ago – when we first started our hosta garden at home, we moved some clumps around in the fall, and we forgot one in the undergrowth on the edge of the woods. The next spring when we were on the deck, we could not figure out what was growing in amongst the weeds that was getting higher than the weeds. It was that clump of hosta that we had forgotten to plant. It made it through all winter – above ground. We don’t promote doing this with hosta – they do need to be planted – but it just shows how tough they can be. We have all of our plants on sale now at 30% off so if there were a variety of two that you were thinking of doing this year and didn’t – it’s still not too late to plant them. Just be sure to adequately mulch around the new plantings once we have a couple of inches of frost.
September 1, 2009 – 6:41 am
We have had customers over the years who drive in with SUV’s, pickups, dump trucks, sedans, even an Austin Healey to pick up plants. Yesterday, a customer came in with his street rod pulling a small trailer and picked up a tree! One time a customer came in on his way home from fishing and we loaded up his boat (which was on the trailer) with shrubs and perennials!
We do deliver plant material, soil mix, rock and mulch – but you can save on the delivery fee by bringing in your own vehicle/trailer to take your new plants home. You will be surprised on how we can load your plants in smaller vehicles to get them home safely. If you have questions on what would work – please give us a call and we’ll give you some advice!
August 17, 2009 – 8:48 am
A late season bloomer – what could be prettier than this! This Anemone – called ‘Robustissima’ starts blooming late summer into early fall. Reaching a height of 30″-36″, it graces the back of the perennial bed giving you that spark of color. Windflowers can grow from Zone 3 to Zone 8. These perennials can be found even in the Rocky Mountains where in higher elevations the winters are colder. Anemones prefer partial shade with well drained soil. They can be planted in full sun, but be sure to keep them moist during the really hot periods.
Companion plants for the Anemone would be hosta, ferns, cimicifuga (bugbane), ornamental grasses, asters, sedums, and hardy mums. These flowers can be planted in mass which when they blossom will sway with the wind and provide a stunning feature to any perennial garden!
August 6, 2009 – 11:32 am
These shade perennials grace my hosta garden. The photo to the right shows Pulmonaria - also known as Lungwort. These blossom in early spring with red, pink, white and blue flowers – depending on the variety. Some varieties have more a white colored leaf, while some are speckled or blotched, while others are mostly green. They look soft and have a velvety feel.
We have a bermed area with a birch tree in one of the hosta garden islands and between the tree and the outer row of hosta, we have a grouping of Lamium. The variety we have in this location is ‘White Nancy’, and it sports white flowers during the summer. There are a couple of varieties that have pink flowers and perhaps one of my favorites – ‘Orchid Frost’ with purple flowers. Lamium has smaller leaves that are green with white on top, again soft looking, and will flower.
A shade perennial with glossy green leaves that spreads out and fills in an area very nicely is Pachysandra. Also known as Japanese Spurge, it will form a compact looking plant, will spread once established, and produces a white, bottlebrush flower in the early spring.
Perhaps the most pretty of my groundcovers (and most aggressive) is the Ranunculus – or creeping buttercup. The lime green with a yellow cast to the leaves crawl around the area, and circles the plants. Bright butter yellow flowers in the spring will certainly brighten up your shade garden.
I have several other groundcovers in my hosta garden – Snow on the Mountain, Lysimachia, and Sweet Woodruff. As the name implies, these are groundcovers – basically meaning that they will spread. Where I want to keep a contained area, I simply pull out the runners to keep it in check. When you pull the runners out, if done carefully, you can transplant to another area that you’d like to have a groundcover in. I usually “thin” my groundcovers only once or twice during the summer and it keeps them where I want them!
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.
This past week, our crews installed 12 balled and burlapped shade trees into two of the City’s parks. Grant Park was the recipient of 3 hybrid Elms, 3 Oaks, 2 Maples and 3 Honeylocust trees. Jefferson Park received an Autumn Blaze Maple. Each year we donate trees to Northfield’s parks in appreciation of the support that the Northfield community gives our business. We hope to be able to continue this program for many years to come.
