For the past month we have been working as contributors to HGTVGardens.com.  Mark and I are thrilled to have this opportunity to share our garden, cooking and crafting stories with others. HGTVGardens just release several of our articles on the site and we’d like to share them with our readers today. Bean Paste Stew with… Read More

There’s no such thing as a good bug, right? First of all, there are plenty of places that we don’t need bugs: I don’t care for cockroaches, silverfish, or bedbugs (although I’m sure they serve their purposes).  Once I’m outside, though I tend to give bugs the benefit of the doubt in order to protect… Read More

Tie Dye Japanese Style This week I experimented with natural dyes and Shibori.  I was pleasantly surprised with the outcome of this project. Plants have been used for centuries as sources for dyes.  The shades they can produce range from grays to reds, depending on the plants used. In my project I used blueberries, hibiscus… Read More

Garden Tools Redo Since the original post on this theme, I have come across a few tool heads that were destined to be thrown away, and couldn’t help but rescue them.  These tools still have a lot of life left in them, and it may help some of you to see these examples of the… Read More

Sweet Magnolia Southern Magnolia, Magnolia grandiflora, needs no introduction around here. The genus Magnolia includes over 200 species, but the word magnolia means one thing in the South: huge white flowers, sweetly scented, on a large broad-leafed evergreen tree. It is most beloved, although sometimes preferred from a distance. This species is native to the… Read More