-Tower Hill Botanic Garden's annual Winter Open House is on Sunday, November 15, from 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. Admission is free. With the theme, "Always in Season," the event highlights the activities at Tower Hill that take place throughout the year. Volunteers and staff members will answer questions about membership, private rentals, educational programs, youth programs, volunteering, horticulture, special events, and future development of Tower Hill. Executive Director John Trexler will lead a tour of the grounds at 2:00 p.m.

From 11am to 3pm, members of the Bay State African Violet Society will offer an African Violet re-potting clinic; for $1 per plant, "leggy" and rubber-necked African Violets will be divided and re-potted with fresh soil and a new pot, along with expert violet growing advice and tender loving care.

The Garden is located at 11 French Drive, in Boylston, MA, exit 24 off Interstate 290. For details and directions, call 508-869-6111 or sign on to www.towerhillbg.org

Carol Stocker will be back today at 1 p.m. to answer your gardening questions. Log in below.

Questions? Carol Stocker will be on line live in a chat room Thursday, Nov. 5, from 1-2 p.m. at Boston.com to answer your gardening questions.

Don't cut back hydrangea shrubs that produce colored flowers, though you can cut off the old flower heads for neatness. If your colored hydrangeas failed to bloom last summer, try covering them completely with a mound of bark mulch or wrapping them with burlap to protect next year's flower buds, which are often formed on this year's wood. Uncover the bushes and their buds at the end of March. This is not necessary with most white hydrangeas, which are more cold hardy than colored hydrangeas. Annabelle, the popular three food hydrangea with giant white flower heads in summer can be cut down to the ground now. Do not cut down Pee-Gee hydrangea trees, which have woody stems.

What to do in the garden this week...

Nursery bargains: There is still time to plant woodies and perennials you buy on sale, but don't tarry and don't buy or transplant evergreens until next year.

Fallen leaves: Keep lawns raked to prevent leaves from matting
and smothering the grass. But you can let leaves remain under woodlands or
around the edge of shrubbery and perennial beds to act as an informal mulch. Don't bag and throw away valuable leaves. Pile them in a heap to
compost along with the rest of your disease-free garden refuse. Speed the
composting process by adding lime.

Irrigation system: If you have gear-drive rotor sprinklers installed above ground, drain them now. If the water does not drain out on
its own, you need to install a drain valve somewhere on the sprinkler
supply pipe so you can drain the water out. Or you can remove the rotors and shake the water out of them and store them inside for the winter. If
you have gear-drive rotors mounted above ground, check to make sure the
water has drained out of them.

Pond clean-up: If you have fish you plan to keep in the pond over
the winter, keep the pump running and arrange its intake to draw water
from a minimum of 12 inches above the pond bottom. On the other hand, iIf
you want to shut off the pump completely, disconnect your submersible pump
after you notice ice developing on the pond surface. Clean the pump and
keep it in a dry place until spring. Then drain all plumbing lines and the
filter, and clean the filter pads.

Questions? I will be on line live in a chat room Thursday, Nov. 5, from 1-2 p.m. at Boston.com
to answer your gardening questions.

Great news for botany --- New England Wild Flower Society has been awarded a $2.49 million grant from the National Science Foundation to develop GO BOTANY! - a multi-faceted program to bring Botany into the 21st Century. Included in this grant is the construction of three online keys for the identification of all native plant species in New England. These keys will allow people to go into the field with a hand-held device instead of several very heavy books. This online setup will serve the whole of the United States since it sets a framework for organizations in other regions to construct comprehensive botanical guides which will interface with this one.

Researching the taxa and building the computer models are William Brumback (Conservation Director at New England Wild Flower Society), Dr. Elizabeth Farnsworth (Author, Ecologist, and Educator, MA), Arthur Haines (New England Wild Flower Society Research Botanist), and Sidharth Koul (New England Wild Flower Society Programmer Analyst). Key partners for research, development, and testing include the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History, New Haven, CT; the Montshire Museum of Science, Norwich, VT; and the Chewonki Foundation, Wiscasset, ME.

What to do in the garden this week...

Spring bulbs: Continue planting. Instead of tulip and crocus
bulbs, which are attractive to the currently high population of squirrels
and chipmunks, buy daffodils, alliums, Siberian squill, grape hyacinths,
and snowdrops. Good mail order sources include Brent and Becky's Bulbs (brentandbeckysbulbs.com), Old House Gardens

(oldhousegardens.com; 734-995-1486) and Van Engelen (vanengelen.com;
860-567-8734). Don't plant true lily bulbs unless you are ready to
spray or handpick red lily leaf beetles from April through September next year.

Tender bulbs: If you don't have time to dig up tender bulbs and
winter them over, just buy new ones in the spring.

Vegetables: Harvest cabbages as soon as the heads become solid. Twist
plants a quarter turn to partially sever the root and prevent growth but
leave the heads attached for storage in the garden until you are ready to use them.
Dig parsnips only as you need them, but harvest all
late potatoes now. Remove spent plant material from the vegetable garden.
Where the garden is empty for the winter, spread aged manure, compost,
leaves, or grass clippings on top and then turn or rototill them under.

Questions? I will be on line live in a chat room Thursday, Nov. 5, from 1-2 p.m. at Boston.com
to answer your gardening questions.

Photo: Robert Mussey

"Chain-Hounds" is one of a pair of scary outdoor sculptures by artist W. Klemperer at the third biennial sculpture exhibit at The Fells. "Animal Attractions" features 37 amazing outdoor animal sculptures in the extensive gardens of The Fells, 457 Route 103A, Newbury, N.H. 03255. For more information visit www.thefells.org.

Last weekend I visited The Fells, an Historic Estate and Garden once owned by Abraham Lincoln's former secretary John Hay on Lake Sunapee in N.H. where Robert Mussey photographed this 100 foot long perennial boarder that is magnificent even this late in the season. The tall blue and pink flowers are New England asters. More surprising, the tall red "flowers" are actually the staked seed heads of spent Queen of the Prairie, a native wildflower. The house is closed for the season now but the gardens and hundreds of acres of landscaped trails with views of lake Sunapee are open to visitors for free from dawn to dusk. In addition to the Perennial Border, there is an Old Garden, hidden behind masses of rhododendron, lake views from the formal Rose Terrace and a most exceptional hillside rock garden where a brook trickles to a Japanese water lily pool, all ablaze in color as of last weekend. There is also a wonderful show of outdoor garden art. For more information visit www.thefells.org. The address is 456 Route 102A, Newbury, NH.

Photo: Robert Mussey

Frost came early this year.
So what do you compost?
What do you store alive in the basement?
What do you send to community composting?
And what do you throw out in plastic trash bags for incineration?

Pull out tender annuals and put them in the compost, along with soil you are dumping from planted containers.
Bag dead tomato plants and put them out with the trash in plastic bags. Do the same with invasive weeds such as Japanese knotweed, orange rooted bittersweet, and grapevine-like porcelain berry.
Pull unwanted but non-invasive weeds such as goldenrod and put them in leaf bags with the raked leaves for community composting rather than in your own compost pile.
Do not compost weed seeds or diseased leaves yourself.
Cut down brown perennials such as Joe Pye weed and compost them.
But leave plants that are still blooming, such as sedum, asters, phlox and ornamental grasses, standing a while longer.
If you don't have time to dig up tender bulbs such as canna and dahlia rhizomes and
winter them over, just buy new ones in the spring. Otherwise, lift the roots our of the soil with a garden fork, cut off the tops, and store the roots in labeled boxes in a cool place such as an unheated basement where temperatures do not fall below freezing.
Bring in pots of tropicals and store them in the basement, too. They may go dormant and sprout again next spring.

Q&A
Bob emails:
I live near the ocean , any recommendations for using seaweed in my organic garden?

Carol replies:
Seaweed is an excellent soil amendment. It is full of micro-nutrients that make it far superior to chemical fertilizer. I would lay it on top of your garden this fall as a winter mulch. This would also give it time to break down a bit over the winter. Then I would dig it into the topsoil in the spring, especially if you are doing a vegetable garden.

Photo: Robert Mussey

Last weekend garden photographer Robert Mussey and I combined leaf peeping during the peak fall color in central Vermont with visiting some of the many first class nursery in the Green Mountain State. This is the best one we found on that trip. Cady's Falls Nursery is the 30-year-old love child of Don and Lela Avery. It's about a half hour north of Stowe at 637 Duhamel Road, Morrisville, Vermont, and is still open Tuesday to Saturday but you should call before you visit (802 888 5559). Don maintains a terrific website with his photos of the garden for a virtual visit at www.cadysfallsnursery.com. They specialize in VERY cold hardy perennials, unusual conifers, native wetland plants, alpines, hellebores, clematis, you name it...the display gardens are gorgeous and include one of the best man-made bogs we have ever seen. No mail order.

Plant your tulips before Thanksgiving.

"Purdy" is one of dozens of colorful tulip mixes created and by Colorblends, a Connecticut based wholesale tulip mail order company. Most of the mixes are bought by parks and professional designers, but home gardeners can order them, too. Read my previous blog entry, "Gardener's Almanac: Tulips" for an interview with Colorblends owner Tim Schipper. For more colorful pictures, go to his website at www.colorblends.com.

Photo courtesy Colorblends.

It's time to plant bulbs for spring blooms. I was talking to Tim Schipper, owner of one of my favorite tulip catalogs, Colorblends, the other day.

Tim Schipper's tulip advice is simple:

1. Plant your tulips bulbs before Thanksgiving.

2. Performance is fool-proof the first spring "even if you plant the bulbs upside down."

3. If you prize perfection, pull the tulips out and discard them after they bloom once, because they diminish in subsequent years.

4. But if you want to keep tulips around to bloom a second spring you have to leave the foliage in the ground until it gets all yellow and ugly (i.e. "cured"). "Cutting down green bulb foliage is like stripping the leaves off a tree."

5. If you have a deer problem, don't even try to grow tulips. "Hang out the white flag of surrender and switch to daffodils."

I love the many different effects you can get by mixing tulips and I think the color combinations that Tim creates and sells, mostly to institutions and professional designers, are brilliant. You can order his bulb mixes too. Plant them out front and the neighbors will think you really have flare.

He told me he had his Eureka! moment back in 1985. Tim is a third generation Dutch tulip merchant and was visiting potential customers at a swank Washington, D.C. golf course with a full-time horticulturalist. "The guy was a total tulip nut," Tim told me. "He showed me these flower beds where he had combined different colored tulips and they looked fantastic."

Tim had never seen anything like it before because the Dutch considered mixing and blending tulip varieties a "heresy." They viewed tulips as a crop, like wheat or potatoes, and they went to great lengths to keep their colors pure and separate in the growing fields. "And this carried over into how tulips were used in decorations," said Tim. Traditionally, they were grown in distinct blocks of colors, not intermixed.

But Americans like to mix and match. The problem with making up your own blend of tulips is that if you look in a catalog and you think the red ones and the yellow ones would look good blended together, you usually find the following May that the red ones finish blooming a week before the yellow ones.

Blending tulip colors is trickier than it looks. Which is why most purveyors sell daffodil mixes, not tulip mixes.

When Tim started creating his own mixes of tulips for his company Colorblends in his Bridgeport, CT., test garden, he found that nine out of ten tulip combinations he tried didn't work.

"The timing was wrong. Or some types were too big. Or some were to short. Or they were no longer available from the grower. People can try this at home, but if they buy my blends, the mistakes and rejects are on my nickel, not their nickel," Tim told me.

Through trial and error, Tim has developed and marketed dozens of classy tulip mixes that do work. He believes that "blending tulips is a little like mixing chemicals. Get it wrong and nothing happens, or maybe too much. Get it right and the colors seem to feed off each other."

He clearly has an artist's touch, because some of his combinations are as stunning as they are unlikely. He considers the names of the tulips he combines a trade secret but he gives his mixes their own names, such as "French Blend," which sounds like a coffee but is instead a spectrum of eight compatible colors. "Purdy" is a happy-go-lucky combination of poppy red, deep purple and golden yellow. "Above & Beyond" has three tulips that work even though they bloom at slightly different heights. "Aladdin's Carpet" is the most fashion forward mix using six wild tulips, three muscari and a dwarf narcissus that give the effect of a wild meadow.

To see how these combinations actually look, visit his website. The majority of his clients are institutions and professional garden designers and the minimum order is $50 in quantities of 100 bulbs. But even if you're a homeowner who knows little about gardening, these combinations will make you look like a horticultural genius. Colorblends (1-888-847-8636; www.colorblends.com.)

Hey gardeners, it's getting frosty out there, eh? Well, get your questions ready for garden expert Carol Stocker who will be stopping by for a live chat at 1 p.m. today. Enter your questions in the form below.

I will be live on line tomorrow to answer gardening questions at 1 p.m. on boston.com

Brookwood Community Farm

One of the best things you can do for your planet is buy locally grown foods, as I was saying to members of the Boxborough Garden Club when I spoke to them yesterday. It does no good to buy organic food grown in California that has a huge carbon footprint from shipping.

I recently visited Brookwood Community Farm in Milton and was impressed that this is what we need more of. It was created in 2006 to build community through the endeavor of growing food. Co-founders Judy Lieberman and Mark Smith saw the potential of Brookwood Farm – a 75-acre dormant farm in the Blue Hills Reservation managed by the Dept. of Conservation and Recreation – to play a significant role in creating a more local and sustainable food system.

In early 2006, Lieberman and Smith met with then DCR Commissioner Stephen Burrington to lay out their vision of a farm operation on the Brookwood farm site that united the values of environmental and social justice. Burrington gave them the green light and one acre of land to see what they could grow.

In it’s first year, Lieberman, Smith and a handful of youth and volunteers grew food one acre. They initiated a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program -- a farming model in which farmers sell harvest shares directly to people in the local community before the seeds are ever sowed in the field. CSA’s provide farmers the capital they need to put the farm in operation. Farm members benefit by sharing in the farm’s bounty during harvest season, receiving a box of fresh vegetable every week.

Brookwood Community Farm operates as a non-profit organization because in addition to operating a CSA and selling at local farmers markets, its mission is also to improve access to fresh, organic food in nearby low-income neighborhoods.

Within months of planting the first seeds in the fields, Brookwood Community Farm was planting seeds of another variety in nearby urban neighborhood of Mattapan. Committed to ensuring that the organic food grown at Brookwood was accessible to all, Brookwood Community Farm initiated a conversation with residents of Mattapan to brainstorm together how Brookwood could meet the needs of Mattapan residents. The idea of a new farmers market was soon hatched, and in 2007 the market was launched.

Now in its fourth growing season, Brookwood is determined to build on its foundation and expand its vision. Brookwood thinks of sustainability in many ways–environmentally, socially, and economically. Because of its donations to local food pantries and its commitment to improving access to good food in poorer neighborhoods, Brookwood is challenged to build long term financial sustainability into its business plan. “If community health is a broad goal for society, and access to fresh food one of its central strategies, then we need the business, medical and philanthropic communities to support the work of local farms that are working toward that goal in concrete ways.”

Smith wrote me: “As Wendell Berry noted, what we choose to eat today will determine the future of the planet. Some of the most pressing challenges today (climate change, the need for renewable energy, rising obesity levels and related diseases, and protecting our land and water resources for future generations) intersect with local food systems. Brookwood Community Farm involves people in being part of the solutions to many of these issues.”

(GardenGirlTV.com) The end of summer doesn't have to mean the end of gardening season with Asian veggies. Garden Girl Patti Moreno shows you how to create a Chinese kitchen garden.

Potential new members are always welcome

All programs held at the Wellesley Community Center

219 Washington Street Wellesley, MA 02482

November 16 Regular Meeting 11:30 AM

Presenter: Barbara Charlton

“MFA Art in Bloom Road Show”

January 11, 2010 Regular Meeting 11:30 AM

Presenter: Crickett Vlass: Wellesley DPW

“Low Maintenance Landscaping”

February 8 Regular Meeting 11:30 AM

Presenter: David Epstein

“The Winter Garden”

March 8 Regular Meeting 11:30 AM

Presenters: Betty Ferris & Teresa Ettinger

“Putting the ‘Hort’ on culture with Betty & Teresa”

May 2 Mini Art in Bloom – Wellesley Community Center 2:00 – 4:00 PM

A spectacular display of floral interpretations enhancing

paintings done by local artists

Fall is a great time to recognize and tackle the new invasive Asian plants that are rapidly over running our wild areas and backyards. These plants hide when leaves are green, but often hold their foliage later than other plants and become easier to spot now. If you want more information, you can start with a class at the nation's number one educator on this issue, the New England Wildflower Society:

Sunday, October 18, 2009, 10 a.m.-2 p.m. Invasives: ID, Ecology, and Control. Garden in the Woods, Framingham. This course provides an introduction to about 40 of the most common invasive non-native plants in our local landscapes. Ted Elliman leads this class through lecture, discussion, power-point presentation, herbarium specimens, and a walk outside, become familiar with identification clues as well as the habits of a number of these plants that are so disruptive of natural ecosytems. Discuss management techniques for many of these species, on both a home and a landscape scale. Fee: $44 (Member) / $52 (Nonmember). Cosponsor by New England Wild Flower Society, MA Audubon Drumlin Farm, and Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University. Pre-registration is necessary, contact the registrar at 508-877-7630, ext. 3303.

Other NEWFS classes include:

Fridays, October 23, 30, November 6, 10 a.m.-3 p.m. Horticultural Techniques.

Saturday, October 24, 9:30 a.m.-12 noon. Assessing Tree Health and Structure.

Children’s Classes

Thursday, October 8, 3:30-5:30 pm. Seed Safari.

Thursday, October 22, 3:30-5:30 p.m. Living off the Land: Native American Lessons.

For more information, visit www.newenglandwild.org/learn.

Here's a new video from our partner, Garden Girl, aka Patti Moreno. Patti is a native New Yorker who now calls The Hub home. We'll be featuring her videos in the gardening blog. She'll offer tips and more on gardening.

Curious how to transition your gardens into fall? Blogger Carol Stocker will take your gardening-related questions Thursday, Oct. 1, at 1 p.m. Submit your questions and comments before or during the discussion in the box below.