As some of you know, I (Maggie) am a writer for Herb Quarterly magazine. In the current issue,I have an article about "green"gardening (ironic, no?), and I talk alot about re-using items you already have, or scavenging things from craig's list and freecycle. I mention our little greenhouse as an example - It was actually given to us, years ago - an older woman we knew was no longer able to use it, and wanted it to have a good new home. Her husband had built it for her, using primarily recycled window frames and ingeneuity. It's an adorable little greenhouse and has given many people years of use - while keeping loads of windows out of the landfills!

Kate, an HQ reader, wrote to me asking for pictures of our little greenhouse. I dug this out from our archives. If I can find better ones, I'll post them later, but for now, Kate (and all other curious HQ readers) - here it is!

As most of you know, we offer various classes, mostly here on the farm. And we LOVE doing so! We keep thinking about a way to offer classes online to our many wonderful customers across the world...but have yet to come up with a great plan to do so. (There are only so many hours in the day unfortunately!) HOWEVER, we do get lots of emails from our (inter)national customers about classes, so I thought I'd post about a few options here.

Our friends Tina and Maryanne, of The Essential Herbal and Lancaster Soapworks, are offering a REALLY spectacular-sounding online soapmaking class! Check out the details here on Tina's blog - they are limiting the class to a certain number of students, so I highly recommend signing up very soon if you are interested.

We are teaching a class here on the farm about Homemade Natural Cleansers. The class draws heavily on an article I wrote for the Herb Quarterly in the Summer 2008 issue. (Did you guys know that I write a monthly column for that magazine, as well as feature articles??) Anyway - it does have some really great recipes in it, if you can find a copy at your local library I'd highly recommend it. Otherwise you can order a copy from their website. I also recommend 2 books on this subject:

The Naturally Clean Home by Karyn Siegel-Maier is my favorite - it's packed with great recipes that really work.

Clean House Clean Planet by Karen Logan is also great!

We also have a great recipe for homemade laundry soap on our website,and we DO plan to add more natural home cleanser recipes to our website soon, so stay tuned.....


Last, but not least - we do offer several natural dyeing classes here on the farm - we haven't yet offered one on rust-dyeing, but I *did* write a tutorial for Hobby Farm Home magazine on how to rust-dye fabrics. It's easy, fun, and a great way to turn rusty "junk" into art. Here are a few items that are dyed with rust (all of these can be found in my etsy store, by the way...)