Knecht’s

The past two months has been an ultimate e-experience. Leif and I have used the internet to research information and monitor weather and that has been about it. This winter we set upon the task to develop a web-site and with the assistance of Griff Wigley of Wigley & Associates, we have a very extensive web-site which we’re excited about. We will now be sending newsletters out to our e-customer list and every other week we’ll feature a new coupon or sales item. Please sign up for our e-mail list on our home page and we’ll be sure you’re added for our newsletters.

Spring has officially arrived at the nursery. It is hard to believe that we went from a 15 degree morning a little over ten days ago to almost 70 degrees this week. What wonderful spring weather. I wish the little lady beetles would have gone south.

We have just started to uncover all of our plants which we have over-wintered. If you have driven past the nursery this winter, you will have noticed several large white “pillows” decorating the nursery. These are our over-wintering blankets that we place over our container trees, shrubs and perennials.

Kevin Borek and Kristian Bjornard are pictured here uncovering a section of smaller Autumn Blaze Maple trees. When I last checked with the crews, the girls had uncovered more blocks of plants than the guys! Within the next few days, we’ll have all of our plants uncovered, and stood up, and our sales areas will then get set up. The season is upon us.

With the incredible spring weather, people have really started to think about getting their landscaping done. We have many landscape consultations scheduled, and Jessie Vieths, our designer, is busily working on landscape design plans for our customers. Please give us a call if you would like to visit with Jessie about your yard, and perhaps also to have a landscape plan drawn.

Betsy and Joe Gasior of Northfield have just picked out two large trees to have tree spaded into their new yard on Aldrich Drive here in Northfield. Their yard will soon feature a Whitespire Birch Clump and Adams Crabapple. We have over 200 varieties of trees in our container and field inventory. The large trees are moved in with a large tree spade truck. We sell trees from the large ones that the Gasior’s have chosen, to smaller container trees. We have trees that will will fit the needs of any of our customers. You can plant them yourself, or hire one of our crews to plant them for you.

While Mom and Dad were busy deciding on the trees for the yard, Timothy and Michael were playing ball with Gabby. Gabby loves to play ball, and with the bright sunshine and warm weather, Timothy and Michael enjoyed throwing the ball for her.

This weblog is RSS-enabled. What’s RSS?

It’s a radio signal for a website, most commonly used for weblogs. More technically: “Rich Site Summary (RSS) is a lightweight XML format designed for sharing headlines and other Web content. Think of it as a distributable “What’s New” for your site.” See Intro to RSS for more info.

The Newspaper Association of America site has an informative article titled Syndication Made Simple. “Just as free e-mail newsletters enable publishers to directly reach readers and promote online and in-paper content, RSS “pushes” headlines and succinct, one-sentence article descriptions to those who subscribe to the no-cost feeds.”

The other side of syndication is aggregation. Here’s an article from Wired News that explains why aggregators are all the rage: Aggregators Attack Info Overload.

This icon is the cue that we’re RSS capable. So train your aggregator to grab content from Knecht’s Nurseries syndicated weblog.

Leif and I just returned last night from a week in London. We usually go on vacations into the wilderness so a week in a major city of 7 million people was definitely an adventure. We visited the usual sites — Buckingham Palace, Big Ben, Westminister Abbey, Windsor Castle, Bath, Stonehenge and the like, however the most fun we had was touring the English gardens.

We were in London just when the blossoming daffodils and crocus were in their prime. The English plant literally millions of bulbs in all of their gardens. There are masses of yellow, white and orange daffodils lining streets, under trees and just about anywhere you look.

On Saturday the 13th of March, we walked through Kennsington Gardens and the cherry trees were just starting to put out their spring blossoms. By Wednesday, just before we came home, they were in full blossom.

Our favorite garden that we visited was the Queen Mary Circle within Regent’s Park. It was fabulous and the number of rose gardens they have is amazing. June apparently is the time when the roses are in full bloom. The English gardens we toured we more of the formal gardens rather than the English cottage garden. Perhaps our next trip we’ll get out into the country more where the cottage gardens are.

We had a taste of spring this past week and are anxious to see our bulb displays here at the nursery start to come up and bloom. We planted several hundred more bulbs last fall, so in a few weeks when the bulbs are starting to bloom, be sure to stop by the nursery and take a peek. Watch our blog and our picture library for Spring pics.

For three years I have been writing a weekly newspaper column on gardening and landscaping subjects. I’m happy to report that these articles are now available to you on our website by clicking on the Library. Some are posted right now and the rest will be posted by the end of the month. Each week you will see a new article posted soon after it has been published in the Northfield News. These articles appear in the Wednesday edition in the Farm and Garden section, just behind the sports page.

We are excited to now have our plant list up on our website. We have diligently tried to get this as complete as possible and hope you’ll find what you need! We do reserve plants if you find one that you’ve been looking for!

Since we have just started our website and the plant list currently includes just the variety names of various plants, we have established links to the websites of one of our major wholesale suppliers.

Walters Gardens has created two great resource sites at

PerennialResource.com

and at

DesignerDaylily.com

Both give detailed information on many of the perennial varieties which will be available for sale at our nursery during the upcoming season.

We invite you to visit their websites and if you have any questions, please contact us.

Think Spring!

A welcome 8 inch heavy wet snowstorm brought a little excitement to the Northfield area this morning, but will provide much needed moisture to help recharge dry subsoils which remained fairly dry going into the winter of 2003-04.

As you can see many trees were heavy laden with snow (see our winter photo gallery for more) and we did observe some limb damage on some older trees, however, young trees in the nursery and even the very bent over River Birch in the picture will bounce right back with few negative effects.

After a bit of snowplowing, we are right back at work filling the greenhouses with perennials and tiny trees. Every year when we start with these 3″ to 12″ tall trees and end up with 3 foot to 6 or 7 foot trees at the end of the year we always marvel that it can happen. By starting them in the greenhouse the first week of March we effectively extend the growing season by about 2 months and have developed special techniques to get the maximum out of the genetic growth potential of these hybrid Maples, hybrid Elms, Lindens and River Birch.

Spring has officially arrived at Knecht’s Nurseries. Today we are potting up our first shipment of little trees.

The trees are then placed in the greenhouse, kept nice and warm, and begin to grow! By Wednesday, our perennials start to arrive. We have over 10,000 perennial plugs and bare root stock coming in, in the next two weeks, which will keep our returning staff quite busy. Once the plants start to leaf out, it really seems like spring is here!

For those of you who like to start bedding plants from seed may want to do so now with some of the slower developing varieties. Some annuals on this list include some asters, petunias, and snapdragons. A long germination period and long growing time before blooming are characteristics of the slower annuals. Be sure to have plenty of light available for these plants so you can avoid weak, floppy plants. Most people find that the addition of flourescent lights 6″ above the plants gives enough extra light to get proper growth.

In the winter Leif and I have time to look for additions to our display gardens. These aren’t just plants, some have smiling faces. We found ourselves a large toad a couple of weeks ago and he is just adorable. Look for him hanging out under the trees at the nursery this spring.

Between now and May 15th, we will be holding a Name the Toad contest. The person submitting the name that we choose will be presented with a $25 Gift Certificate for the nursery. Please contact us with the name you think fits our new friend, and your name, address and phone number.

Click the thumbnail for a huge, 650K photo of the toad.