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Consider calling Walter Knoll Florist’s commercial division for expert landscaping!

Visit out commercial division at wkf.plants.com

Or call us at 314 633-8770

It’s gonna be great – we’ll have hundreds, maybe thousands of white poinsettias for kids to paint – as well as protective gear to keep their little outfits tidy – so come on down and get in the Christmas Spirit!

As we prepare and set up our booth for the big show we are also installing over 75 real live Christmas trees around the center-complete with lights!

And our booth will have lots of fully decorated trees and ideas as well as special “show” pricing – there will be ornaments and garland and wreaths and swags you can buy and take with you and we will also have on display our Holiday Arrangements (you may have seen them on our Holiday Unwrapped 2009 brochure we mailed out last week) – so come on down, bring the kids (and $5 of course-proceeds benefit Mathews-Dickey Boys and Girls Club). Tell ‘em Di sent you!

Speaking of poinsettias – you know it’s an old wives tale about them being toxic, don’t you? Well, although we don’t recommend you eat them, they are NOT poisonous.

Here is a pic of a poinsettia painted by a 73-year old!

How about a blue or purple poinsettia?

Can’t get down to the Convention Center this weekend? Don’t despair – visit our garden center at California and LaSalle and see all our poinsettia varieties – here’s a sampling!

They quickly died back only to pop out of the dirt in the spring along with the daffodils, arugula and chard.

By mid April the hard neck variety was already beginning to flower – not really a flower per se but “scapes” began to appear on the central stalk of the hard neck plants.

Well it turns out that the scapes when young and tender can be snapped off as far down the central stalk as is tender and then cooked up like asparagus. They had a wonderful mild garlic flavor with just a slight crunch to them when I used them in a stir fry.

As the scapes develop on the plant they make a couple loop-d-loops and then straighten back out – this process took about 2 weeks, once they straighted back out the stalks lose their tenderness and I read it is either time to cut them off or let them go to “seed”. Each scape becomes a mini clove of garlic. I cut about half of mine off and put them in a vase where they continued to develop into mini cloves – after about a month they have formed cloves and are beginning to develop the characteristic purple skin.

I have now harvestest about a third of the plants – and this is done when about half of the leaves have turned brown – some of the bulbs are pretty small still and these are the hard necks that I did not remove the scapes from. My home grown garlic is very mildly flavored right now – I used an entire large fresh creamy white head in a batch of humus over the weekend and needed to add a store bought clove to bring it up to the garlicyness I like in humus! I imagine as they continue to dry they will develop a stronger garlic flavor.

The soft neck variety does not produce scapes. And I am finding it is more strongly flavored than the hard neck. This year I will plant even more garlic – and both kinds – the soft neck is what is used for the braided garlic you see around and I want to have enough to make a braid next year. This weekend on PBS’s Diary of a Foodie, the Gourmet Magazine show, they featured garlic and I learned that the soft neck variety will store for 6 months and the hard neck for 4.

Click here for a fun very interesting NPR interview with a garlic grower in California

Our garden center is chock full of bloomers! But I won’t mention any names!

Some of the new Flowering Plants

We have a been busy over the at the Lasalle Garden Center this winter,

there is a new automatic door, completely new sales and checkout area, new lighting,  and much more.

Come by and check us out. We’ll be waiting on you!