There’s a NEW holiday tradition being added to St. Louis’s social calendar this year! “Holiday Magic” comes to America’s Center, December 4-6, and it promises to be an exciting and entertaining event for families and shoppers. Enjoy wood carving demonstrations and hands-on crafts, a dazzling light show with over 40,000 holiday lights choreographed to holiday music, and a full-scale indoor carnival.
And best of all . . . Walter Knoll Florist will be there with a special treat for children . . .

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!

5pm on March 25 - he's 21-1/2 inches

9am on 3/24 Mr Stinky is 18" tall

Interesting Foliage during Summer Months

Here’s a little left-over something from my Chicago days. One of my flat-mates’ father was a missionary who traveled the world. He brought a funny tuber back from India that many years later he shared with me – funny potato-looking thing with a very bizarre but interesting growing pattern. He called it an Indian Stink Lily. Many years later and thanks to the internet I have been able to find out about this curious plant – Amorphophallus – also known by many other names including elephant foot, voodoo lily, Telinga potato, corpse flower, and dragon flower just to name a few. When this plant blooms it exudes a fragrance not unlike the smell of rotting flesh. And how funny to receive a plant with such a phallic shape from a missionary!

Mr Stinky on 3/17 - St Pats Day, 1 day of growth!

My one tuber has multiplied many times over but I have only had one bloom before this year’s attraction – that other bloom was in my living room – the March after I received the tuber – before I could smell any foul odor coming from it, any dog guests I had immediately lifted their legs upon entering my apartment. Well, no more doggie friends until this thing is done blooming, but after a day of smelling it, I had to put it out on the back porch to let it die back in the cold. According to Wikipedia, “these are typical lowland plants, growing in the tropical and subtropical zones of the paleotropics, from West Africa to the Pacific Islands.   None of them are found in the Americas although a remarkably similar but not closely related genus, Dracontium, has evolved here” and can be found on the West Coast.

I have planted the tubers directly into my Saint Louis gardens and forgotten to dig them up to bring in for the winter – only to have them reappear around late May – wintered over in the garden! Of course it is too cold here for them to bloom outdoors but they will act like perennials even though they are purported to be tropical or sub-tropical – St Louis weather is really not any kinda tropical (well, perhaps a bit tropical in August).  Here are a few more pictures of my plants’ really unique foliage.

Eventually they create an umbrella shape

Top view, before the leaves canopy

Some very strange speckled stems!

Mr Stinky's Flower stalk, not open yet - and growing 3 to 4 inches a day! This photo is shot in our greenhouse today, 3/24/09

Usually I dig them up and pot ‘em and put them in the basement to winter over, but this year I put them near a South facing bedroom window and about a week ago started to see a bloom coming! Well I own a dog and wasn’t going to put up with that leg-lifting business again so I brought Mr Stinky to work. His bloom as of today has not completely formed and he’s growing 3 or 4 inches a day! Come visit him at our garden center at the corner of California and LaSalle – come soon, I’m sure the garden center helpers are going to make me take him away once the “odor” arrives! While you are here check out all the new spring items coming in, we have some wonderful hand blown glass hummingbird feeders and other giftware as well as tons of growing things coming in almost daily!  Here are a few pics for you!

Azaleas

Our new pottery line includes pots with saucers and matching birdbaths.

Red and Yellow Stemmed Dogwoods

Marigolds (buy one for each tomato plant!)

Yarrow Plants

For years I have searched for information on my VooDoo Plant but have never found foliage or flowers that look like mine – until today, check out Martha’s blog here for more info and photos – I wonder if she got her’s from a missionary!  It looks to me that we have the same variety.  I’m planning to put a photo up daily chronicalling Mr Stinky’s bloom so check back!

Fields of Poinsettias

The Garden Center is a riot of color right now!  So many poinsettias!  If you are in the city, plan to make a trip to Florist Row and the Walter Knoll Florist Garden Center -

Red Pink Red

Close Up

Friendly Staff - ALWAYS!

Many Sizes

Traditional

RED RED RED

Pinks and Greens

Pink and White

Feathery Pinks!

Red and White

Beautiful Pinks

Green!

with Santa!

You can read about Pointsettia care and feeding or visit our web site wkf.com for more of our holiday selections

I know of two types of garlic – soft neck and hard neck. Toward the end of summer last year and on a whim with an abundance of garlic bulbs I planted both soft and hard neck garlic. I separated the cloves from the bulbs and planted each “toe” root end down about two inches deep. I can’t remember if we had a lotta rain or if I was just diligent about watering, but within a week or so they had sprouted leaves and by the time we had our first cold snap they were probably a foot tall.

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

How to care for your orchid plant