For some reason, I had a particularly good year with my begonias.

I like to mix up bright orange and fire-engine red ones.

And up close:

Usually I save my begonias from year to year, but I let them go too long last fall in an outdoor pot and lost them to a sudden deep frost. So I bought all new ones in May.

They kept going right up to November, until I finally cut them back before a big frost could get to them. Here they were at the end of the season.

Most people treat tuberous begonias as outdoor annuals, but it’s really easy to dig them up after a light frost blackens the leaves or just before a really deep frost. Or you can bring them indoors for the winter as houseplants.

Just cut back all the foliage and pull up the plant.

Bring them indoors and let them dry out for a week or so. At this point, you can cut back the roots and just save the actual tubers, but I simply throw all of the root balls into a brown paper grocery bag and leave it in the basement for the winter.

Tuberous begonias are very slow to get going in spring, so try to remember to pot them up a good 6 to 8 weeks before moving them outdoors in mid to late May.

My friend Suki has great yellow begonias.

She puts them in hanging pots on her front porch and they look great all summer.

It’s a struggle sometimes in May to get the colors you want, so I convinced her this year (I think) to save these great yellow ones.

I thought begonias would get really droopy in hanging pots, but these ones did just fine.

Want to save your geraniums, too? Here’s an earlier post on that.

Lasdon Park, one of the real jewels in the Westchester County parks system, is hosting its first holiday open house and poinsettia show this weekend. And all proceeds go to the park’s greenhouse fund, a very good cause.

My colleague Mary Shustack has the full story on her Just Browsing blog.

And here’s the press release from Mary Kaye Koch:

“A special preview for visitors to get a head start on their holiday decorating and shopping will kick off the first ever Holiday Open House and Poinsettia Show on Saturday and Sunday, December 1 and 2, at Lasdon Park, Arboretum and Veterans Memorial in Somers.

“From 11 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. each day, visitors are invited to view the stately, country-style main house elegantly decorated for the holidays with floral designs and arrangements, including a beautiful “poinsettia treeâ€? comprising these festive holiday plants in a variety of colors. Visitors can browse an art show featuring works by botanical artist Corinne Lapin Cohen and her students at the arboretum which will also be on display in the gallery.

“Suggested donation for the Holiday Open House and Poinsettia Show is $5 per person.

“Visitors can also stop in at the Shop at Lasdon, which will offer festive holiday plants to help decorate your home, along with gardening-related items that are perfect for your favorite horticulturist.

“A special preview party will be hosted at the main house on Friday evening, November 30, featuring hors d’oeuvres and wine, along with live classical music. Admission is $25 per person. Reservations are required by calling (914) 864-7268 or at ttk2@westchestergov.com.

“The Lasdon Glass House Conservatory, a large greenhouse, will be used for rotating educational displays, horticultural shows and educational programs about medicinal plants, butterfly gardens, holiday plants, bonsai, carnivorous plants and more. It will be available to school groups, organizations and horticultural enthusiasts as well as casual visitors, and will make Lasdon Park a year-round botanical attraction.

“All proceeds from the Holiday Open House and Poinsettia Show benefit the Glass House Conservatory fund, a program of the Friends of Westchester County Parks, Inc. A portion of the sales of artwork will also benefit the Glass House Conservatory Fund.

“Lasdon Park and Arboretum, a 234-acre park and developing arboretum featuring many species of trees, shrubs and perennials, is a Westchester County Park. It is located on Route 35 in Somers, and can be reached via I-684, exit 6. Head west off the exit; the park is 3.5 miles ahead on the right. Or, take the Taconic State Parkway to Route 202/Route 35 exit and head east; the park is 3.5 miles ahead on the right.

“For tickets and information, call Lasdon Park at (914) 864-7268.”

Looking for a really easy true blue annual for your garden? Ageratum, which is also deer resistant, may be just the plant. And unlike tender annuals like basil, cosmos and coleus, ageratum will tolerate a few light frosts before dying back for the winter.

Here’s a patch of ageratum in the butterfly garden at the Lenoir Preserve in Yonkers.

It’s a plant I find absolutely irresistible in the nursery every May. Ageratums also come in mauves, purples, pinks and whites, but it’s the blue shades that pull me in every time.

Known botanically as Ageratum houstonianum, these hardworking annuals work well in containers, as edging plants or in the front of a richly planted border. Common names include floss flower, pussy foot and blue fleece flower.

Depending on the cultivar, heights range from 6 inches to 3 feet. The taller varieties, which offer a more graceful and open growing pattern, have grown in popularity in recent years.

Ageratums like fertile, well-drained soil and full sun, but they’ll adapt to partial shade. Unless they’re in a container, I’ve never bothered to water mine. And they seem to thrive in really hot weather.

Like other blue flowers in the garden, ageratum looks good with everything and it makes every other plant around it a little brighter and bolder. I love it with cosmos of any color and orangish-red tithonia (Mexican sunflower).

Dianne K. Olsen, Environmental Horticulture and Natural Resource Educator with Cornell Cooperative Extension of Putnam County, sent me an email about a daylong conference on Saturday at the Glynwood Center in Cold Spring.

Here’s her note:

“How can we continue America‚s legacy of independent farmers and fresh, healthy food in the 21st century?

“FOOD 2 is an annual series of presentations and workshops created in 2006 that sought to answer this question.

“Climate Change, Agriculture, & Community Planning:
A forum for local officials, farmers, and community leaders in the Hudson Valley

December 1, 10:00 am – 3:00 pm, Glynwood Center, Cold Spring, NY

“In this workshop, speakers and participants will discuss the impacts of climate change on agriculture in the Hudson Valley and ways that community planning and farmers can mitigate and adapt to these changes. The featured speakers are Dr. Cynthia Rosenzweig of NASA/Goddard and Joel Russell, a nationally-known community planner and land use lawyer. Dr. Rosenzweig will summarize current scientific projections on the impacts of climate change on agriculture, particularly in the Northeast. Mr. Russell will explain possible mitigation steps that towns and cities can take to reduce the impacts of climate change on agricultural communities.

“Several Hudson Valley farmers, who will share their experiences with climate change and the steps they are taking to deal with its effects, will also participate.

“Cynthia Rosenzweig, Ph.D., is a research scientist and leader of the Climate Impacts Group at the National Aeronautic and Space Administration (NASA) Goddard Institute for Space Studies, which investigates the interactions of climate with systems and sectors important to ecological and human well-being. Dr. Rosenzweig currently leads the Metropolitan East Coast Region for the U.S. National Assessment of Climate Variability and Change. Dr. Rosenzweig studied agronomy as an undergraduate, an interest she continues in her current work.

“Joel Russell has over 28 years of experience as a planning consultant and land use attorney. He is nationally known for his work in smart growth, land conservation, and New Urbanism. Mr. Russell has been at the forefront in drafting land use ordinances that emphasize quality design, the creation of a sense of place, traditional neighborhood development, and the preservation of farmland, open space, and environmental resources. He has published numerous articles and is the principal co-author of Codifying New Urbanism, published by the American Planning Association. He is currently serving as a Glynwood Fellow, developing an advanced professional training program on land use regulation and climate change.

“Workshop Fee: $35 for general public, $15 for farmers; includes light breakfast (9:30 – 10:00) and lunch.

“Advanced registration required. Please call Anita Barber at 845-265-3338 or send her an e-mail at abarber@glynwood.org////subject=December 1 Climate Change Registration.”

I’m just catching up from the holidays (and all of our blogs have been down due to mysterious technical problems). On Sunday, my colleague Julie Alterio had a nice Page One piece on locally grown food and its connection to the proposed federal farm bill. Here’s a link to the article.

A few tidbits from Julie’s piece:

“The farm bill’s effects are far-reaching – extending not only to the pasture and field but also to the school lunchroom, the food stamp program and ultimately the grocery store. It’s no accident that the price of soda fell nearly 25 percent from 1985 to 2000, while the price of fresh fruits and vegetables rose nearly 40 percent. The high-fructose corn syrup that sweetens soda is subsidized by roughly $9 billion a year that the government pays to corn growers, while produce farmers get almost nothing.”

“Though New York’s farm economy produces $3.6 billion a year – planting the state roughly in the middle of the field – less than 1 percent of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s farm subsidies flow here. That’s because New York – and especially the Hudson Valley – produces a lot of fruits and vegetables, which the farm bill mostly ignores. ”

And I had no idea we have so many farmers hanging on here in the Lower Hudson Valley:

“But even here, in between subdivisions, farms abide. The last agricultural census in 2002 found 129 farms in Westchester County that produced $8.85 million in crop and livestock sales. Rockland’s 29 farms generated $3.2 million, and Putnam’s 52 farms yielded $2.4 million.”

Let’s continue to support these local farmers as much as we can by buying (and eating!) locally. Their stuff tastes so much better, too.

This fall, we had to take down a couple of big scraggly spruce trees that were too close to the house, especially after a renovation project that raised the roof line right by the trees.

Rather than fooling with digging up the stumps and making a mess of the whole yard, I’ve decided, at least for now, to live with the leftover roots and make a new garden of sorts.

Here’s the space for my new root garden.

And a view from above, with the stump and water for the birds.

To quickly get some low-growing plants in there before winter, I decided to dig up a few perennials and divide them.

This heuchera (coral bells) hasn’t done very well for a couple of years so I figured it needed to be dug up and divided.

Sure enough, it was covered with little babies ready for separation from the main plant. You just have to divide and pull them apart, making sure you’ve got some roots attached to each new one.

From the one heuchera, I was able to make something like 14 new plants.

Here’s a closeup.

And in the ground, ready to grow.

Next up, a tiarella that I knew would yield several new plants.

A fuzzy closeup.

So now I should have at least a few plants coming up in my new root garden next spring.

I’m off for a few days, until after Thanksgiving (with all those yummy root vegetables). Happy Thanksgiving to all.

For more than three decades, Marco Polo Stufano worked as director of horticulture at Wave Hill in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, reshaping a neglected 28-acre private estate into a public showpiece that’s on many Top 10 lists of best gardens in the country.

Tonight, the legendary plantsman will give the second talk in the new Rocky Hills Lecture Series at the Chappaqua Library. His free lecture, “The Lure of the Small Garden,� will begin at 7:30 p.m. and be followed by a question-and-answer period.

Here he is at Wave Hill. (photo by Mark Vergari.)

Since retiring from Wave Hill in fall 2001, Stufano has been creating an intimate, small garden of his own in Riverdale. Much of his illustrated talk will focus on the evolution and growth of his own garden.

The first talk in the series was held in April at the Chappaqua Library with a presentation by the head gardener at Rocky Hills, Henriette Suhr’s colorful 8-acre garden in Chappaqua.

Here’s Mrs. Suhr in her rose garden. (photo by Tom Nycz.)

The goal of the lecture series is to explore the intersection and interplay of horticulture, garden design and the environment in the region.

Suhr has agreed to eventually turn over her garden to the county, and the Garden Conservancy has accepted a conservation easement as a first step in the preservation of Rocky Hills. The garden will one day become a horticultural education center for gardeners throughout the Lower Hudson Valley and the rest of the state.

The Chappaqua Library is at 195 S. Greeley Ave. in Chappaqua. For more information, call the Garden Conservancy at 845-265-2029 or the library at 914-238-4779, Ext. 119.

Ed Impara, who plants and tends a few public gardening spaces in Ossining, is also a fan of Colorblends. In an earlier post, I had asked what people thought of this mail-order company.

Here’s his email; he sent photos, too:

“Yes, I have ordered from Colorblends for years. The quality of the bulbs (I buy mostly tulips) is excellent. They have expanded their product line over the years.

“If I recall correctly, I first bought bulbs from them in 1996 for an Ossining Beautification project and buy from them ever year.

“Here are a few pictures of the planting I did for Spring 2007 in Rte. 9 and Revolutionary Road, Briarcliff Manor. There are 400 bulbs in the bed. It is a project of the Ossining Beautification Committee.”

Wow, these tulips look great. Colorblends sounds like a winner.

As I’ve said, I like a good bargain in the garden. I don’t mind paying good money for high-quality plants and I always try to buy at local nurseries instead of the big-box stores, but I also like to save what I can from year to year and start new plants from my own seeds and cuttings.

As you may also know from an earlier post, I like old-fashioned red geraniums. And I like to save them from year to year to avoid shelling out money for new ones every May.

Here they were earlier this summer.

One way to save them is to simply bring the whole pot indoors and keep them going all winter in a sunny window. They’ll get droopy and lose a lot of leaves, but they should come through just fine.

But I don’t have a lot of room indoors for extra plants and I find it irritating to have a lot of houseplants. I do save room for two old favorites that I bring indoors every fall: a hibiscus that I’ve had forever.

(It bloomed the best on a tiny north-facing balcony in a west 14th st. walkup years ago.)

And a night-blooming cereus that two great gardeners gave me a few years ago.

I didn’t get it to bloom this year, but I love the foliage.

These are two very tough plants, btw. Last winter I had to shove them into a shower stall and abandon them completely for a good six weeks in the middle of a home renovation project.

Back to geraniums… I used to bring the pots indoors and take them down to my cool (as in 55 degrees), unfinished basement and let the plants go dormant for the winter (just watering every 4 or 5 weeks).

Then I’d bring them upstairs in April and they would very gradually begin to green up and come back to life. It took them well into June to begin to look good again.

The last few years I’ve had great success with an odd-sounding method I read about in a gardening magazine: pull the plants out of their dirt and hang them upside down in a dark, cool place for the winter. It really works and they come back quickly in spring.

Here are the pots at the end of October, just before the first frost.

Just gently tug on each plant and they should come right out.

Shake off whatever dirt you can and let the plants dry out for a few hours.

I used to drape the upside-down plants over drainage pipes in the basement, but now I just stand/lean them in an upside-down heap in a corner of the basement floor.

They’ll drop all their leaves and look awful, but they should remain alive. The key is to get them back into dirt in February, even if you just leave them in the same cool, dark area of your house and water them periodically. OK, it was March for me the last couple of years (too much snow and ice blocking the old outhouse/potting shed) and they did fine.

The new Spring Forward collection of daffodils from a company called Colorblends offers a pair of bloomers that look positively luscious together.

Forty percent of the profits from the Spring Forward line will go to the Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation, the national nonprofit group dedicated to finding treatments and cures for spinal cord injury and improving the lives of people living with paralysis.

One of the deer-resistant daffodils is a vibrant yellow with a broad orange cup. The other is a double with soft yellow petals interspersed with flecks of reddish orange. Daffodils like sunny, well-drained sites.

The company specializes in bulk quanities of bulbs from the Netherlands at discount prices. For more information, visit the Colorblends Web site or call 888-847-8637. Prices for the Spring Forward bulbs start at 25 for $25.

Has anyone ordered from Colorblends? Their stuff looks good, so do the prices.

I just placed a huge bulb order yesterday with Van Bourgondien’s in Virginia. I’ve had good luck with them before (and I get the wholesale catalog).

Their Web site is good, but I almost always just call directly (800-622-9997) when I’m ready to order. That way I can quickly find out what’s sold out (the problem with being a procrastinator) and move toward second and third choices on my list.