May 2000

GARDEN PLANS

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HOME IMPROVEMENT ENCYCLOPEDIA

FAMILY TRAVEL CALENDAR

Editor's Choice Plant Gallery

BH&G TV

Pull up a chair and tune in to Better Homes and Gardens Television with our entertaining hosts Michael and Heidi Spound. Meet friendly experts who will share their distinctive home ideas and delectable recipes. Then trek over to the BH&G Test Garden with Chris Dawson and discover how to gain a full season of pleasure from your spring plantings.

Between friends

On a Roll

Nudge your windows out of a fashion rut with sleek and simple roller shades you can customize to suit your style and your decorating budget.

Recliners

In the Mars vs. Venus, male vs. female debate, the recliner was mostly aligned with manly Mars. But these days, recliners are moving out of the cave and into the parlor with new styles, streamlined mechanisms, and petite sizes even a Venus could love.

Corralling Collections

Most of us have favorite mementos, whether assembled over a lifetime or picked up on a recent vacation. Here are three ideas to help you bring your treasures out of storage and into full view.

Carefree Decorating

A fuss-free home is one step closer to being a happy home. Just ask anyone who's shed even a single house-maintenance chore. Without sweeping taste and personal expression under the rug, you can decorate for carefree ease with elements that are sturdy, scratch-resistant, and washable. These two rooms offer specific ways to accomplish both style and substance.

Living with Plants

Potted plants make naturally beautiful accessories. But so often they're crammed in front of a window, where individual plants get lost in a crowd. Here's how you can let them spread their leaves.

Looking to the Light

We spend good portions of our days-- or at least our evenings-- in the kitchen stirring up dinner, soaping and soaking the dishes, and just plain hanging out. So the kitchen should be an uplifting place to gather. It could look out onto a garden or perhaps include some display space for favorite works of art. And it should definitely drink up-- and dish out-- lots of light.

Breakfast Is Served... ...In an Airy Pavilion

A charming spot to gather for breakfast can be served up in lots of ways, and the space can serve more than just meals. Here's how four families joined the breakfast club. Eating "out" for breakfast is a daily pleasure for Californians Julie and Doug Bodenstad.

Dining Room Deck

Even the sneakiest weather outbursts can have their benefits, such as encouraging much-needed remodeling jobs. A freak Seattle snowstorm knocked down an overgrown privacy hedge and weakened an already rotten deck in Daniel Lowery's backyard. "Many times, you make do with what you have and make it last as long as possible," Daniel says. Now the time was perfect to start fresh on a new deck scheme.

Six Ways To Gain More Storage

Every house has potential storage space that goes to waste you just need to concoct a strategy for putting that space to work. Don't worry, no one's suggesting you turn the bathtub into a bookcase. But if you scrutinize the nooks and crannies throughout the house, you're bound to find spots that make a lot of sense for storage.

Past-Perfect Bath

On snowy evenings in Boulder, Colorado, Vicki Jacobson often slips away to her master bathroom for long, leisurely soaks in her ornately appointed Victorian bathtub. "The bathtub is definitely the thing to have in the winter," she says. "I bring in candles, magazines, and a nice glass of wine, and just relax."

Main Street Revisited

Is there a different kind of community in your future? Come visit these village-style neighborhood developments-- new places with old notions about how to build cities, towns, and suburbs.

Gardening Help

From the editors of Better Homes and Gardens Television and Better Homes and Gardens Books, come four products, all chock-full of information and practical advice about gardening and landscaping. All prices include shipping, handling, and applicable sales tax.

Heirloom Stitchery

Gracious Neighbors

Enter the Better Homes and Gardens 2000 Home Improvement Contest

Now is the Time to Update the Look of Your Home Whether you're redecorating a bedroom or starting a major remodeling job, your home improvement project may rate a top award.

NETWORK NEWS

Building for the future Why wire well?

Start talking about computer networks, those complex systems of wires that connect computing devices, and most office workers have at least one horror story to tell. Computers crash, work gets lost, and files get sent to a printer in some other building. With the headaches at work-- where there's on-site tech support to lend a hand-- do you need a network in your house?

Outside of the Box

Growing with Your Kids

First-time parents often start out believing a fairy tale: They think raising their children is a one-way endeavor. Think again. For every rule of life you teach your children, they seem to teach you two in return.

Looking for Goodness

Metal detectors won't do it. Neither will posting security guards at the schoolhouse door. To really protect and educate children in the 21st century, schools are flipping back to a page from the early 20th century. They are trying to teach Dick and Jane right from wrong.

Mini Minivan in Disguise

PT Cruiser is really a small minivan, not the customized hot rod it appears to be.

Three Times the Rose

Although your garden visitors may not believe you, this horticultural kaleidoscope is only one rosebush-- even though it blooms in three colors and varying shades thereof all at once. More color: New foliage and bud sheaths are a coppery-bronze, and the established foliage is clean green and shiny to boot. And adaptability? The butterfly rose is disease-resistant, shrugs off humidity, and grows taller the more shelter it is given.

LOOK, MA, NO DIRT

Snippets: Free plants forever

Big ol' honkin' leaves

A formal touch for the garden

Oh, one more thing you should know about euphorbias

READER SHOPPING

Small Budget, Big Makeover

Nearly every home landscape could benefit from some fine-tuning. In the case of Martha Miller's front yard, a predictable, angular foundation planting (below) seemed too severe. "The shrubs were lined up in a row," Martha says. "Everything was absolutely square. And it looked like every other house on the street." Martha and two other homeowners in Des Moines, Iowa, agreed to let us watch while they made some small-scale changes to their yards. Their projects, which follow, show that just a few well-placed shrubs or flowers can make a big difference.

No-Sew Shades

Water Play

Every yard has a spot for a water garden. So does every budget. And don't tell us you lack the time to build one. We set out to prove that you can, and for well under $100. Our requirements: no pump, no digging, no waterproof liner. Also, our water gardens had to fit almost anywhere-- on a deck or patio, in a corner of a path, or tucked into the garden. Finally, how about a water garden you can finish on a Saturday? We did it. Here's how you can too.

INSECTS TO GO

On the straight and narrow

Here's the inside skinny on Julia and Chris Cutler's place. When they bought the 700-square-foot cracker box and its attendant elbow-hugging bowling alley of a yard, Chris's parents went pale. Their words-- "You have no idea what you're getting into"-- still ring in Chris and Julia's ears these many years after transforming their house into a Georgian showcase and their front yard "alley" into a virtual vacation spot.

Long-blooming perennials

The average perennial gives you three weeks of flowers a year-- and 49 weeks of idleness. Thankfully, some perennials have more stamina. This petite veronica is one of the overachievers, offering purple mini-spires from May to frost. If you're fond of flowers-- and who isn't?-- this collection of perennials is for you.

Long-blooming perennials

Desperately seeking serenity

With a passion for living quietly and preserving natural beauty, Mary Anne and Tom Thomson have given their spaces tranquillity and inner peace.

Personalizing a Production Home

One of the first steps in building a new house is the preconstruction meeting. That's where you sit down with the builder and decide on options, upgrades, and custom touches. But, if you're not careful, it can also be the meeting where your dream house becomes the dream you can't afford. Here's how editors at Better Homes and Gardens magazine worked with one builder to personalize a conventional production home without ending up with a custom home price.

Mandoline Slicer

Steamer Basket Set

Nutrition Information

With each recipe, we give important nutrition information. The calorie count of each serving and the amount, in grams, of fat, saturated fat, cholesterol, sodium, carbohydrates, fiber, and protein will help you keep tabs on what you eat.

A small study at the Mayo Clinic

Ginger aid

There's real science behind the legends and myths that are associated with ginger.

Outsmart Your Midlife Fat Cell

Don't look down! If ever there is a time to heed that warning it's middle age, when your waist seems to spread like melted butter and your weight climbs faster than your blood pressure. Few women escape-- gaining an average of 12 pounds-- which creep on between ages 35 and 50 as estrogen levels fall and bodies "transition" toward menopause.

Shaping Up to Garden

It's spring, and the lure of getting back in the garden is irresistible. Invigorated by all that balmy fresh air, you spend the first sunny day digging, planting, lifting, and hauling. The next morning, you pay.

Fun with Mother Goose

A wonderland of surprises awaits you, courtesy of Mother Goose. Try your hand at two easy-to-make pies, including a no-bake Little Jack Horner version. Also, create a Mother Goose pin, a Humpty Dumpty game (what a fall!), and a shoe big enough for oh-so-many children-- who happen to look like barrettes.

Reader Resources

If you'd like to try your hand at shaping clay figures like the ones shown in our BH&G Kids feature (see page 291), here are two books that will get you started. The Incredible Clay Book describes and illustrates more than 150 projects you can make (and then bake to permanence) with polymer clay. Packaged with eight one-ounce bricks of polymer clay, the 80-page hardcover book is spiral bound.

The Shopper's Mart

Discover the ease and pleasure of shopping by mail. Order with comfort and convenience from your own home.

The family next door