You’ve had success with tulips and even conquered your fear of pruning the rose bush. But when it comes to growing tomatoes, carrots or cucumbers, your green thumb is nowhere to be found.

Release your inner gardening goddess with tips from the City Farmer: Adventures in Urban Food Growing. The humorous new book by Toronto author Lorraine Johnson will show you how to grow radishes on your rooftop and tomatoes on the balcony. What could be fresher for the summer than a salad of your own making?

Now all that’s left to do is sit back with a glass of white and enjoy the fruits of your labour.

$14.40 at Amazon.ca

The book launch for City Farmer: Adventures in Urban Food Growing is tomorrow at Wychwood Barns (6:30 p.m.-8:30 p.m.), www.torontoartscape.on.ca

Hot Cross Buns ordered?

Baskets assembled?

Husband’s bunny costume picked up from the cleaners? (Don’t laugh, Ben Affleck has one.)

Now how about dinner decor?

Cotton yarn, glue and balloons are all you need to make these jaunty decorative eggs, and, alas, there will be no need to hide them.

Okay hubby, hop to it!

For step-by-step instructions, click here.

If your skin is winter worn, try a homemade scrub before splurging on expensive salts and lousy loofahs:

1/2 cup brown sugar

1/2 cup grapeseed or olive oil
A splash of vanilla extract (or your favourite essential oil)
Stir and slough away.

What’s a stitch 'n bitch without a little yarn envy?

Turn up to your next shindig with bundles of Americo Original's beautiful yarns and you’ll certainly give the girls something to bitch about.

A Queen Street gem, the shop carries unique, handspun yarns (alpaca, wool, cotton) in piles of colours. You can also find custom knitwear patterns and accessories as well as customized leather couches, handbags, and boots all crafted with the finest Argentine leather.

Just make sure someone doesn’t swap their acrylic tat for your good stuff, or needles will fly.

Americo Original, 456 Queen St. W., Toronto, 416-777-9747, www.americo.ca

Whether it’s stitching, baking, fixing, creating, knitting, building or making, Doing It Yourself is all the rage,” says Chloe Fox in this month’s British Vogue. “What shopping was to the Nineties, crafting is to the Noughties.”

There’s a new craft venue in town that’ll help you master your way to a thriftier, happier and more creative you. Bluebird Handmade is a lovely, creative space where children and adults can gather to knit, felt, weave and spin.

Turn up to your next baby shower with handmade cashmere booties, monogram your man’s socks or reinvent on old blazer with shiny, new buttons.

Before you know it, you’ll be hosting knitting parties, crocheting tea cozies and baking cupcakes for the local bazaar.

Bluebird Handmade, 986 Bathurst St., Toronto, 416-535-3232, www.bluebirdhandmade.com

You're the family CEO, purchasing officer, travel agent and archivist.

Time to add another line to your CV: web designer.

With www.babyjellybeans.com, you can create a family website in less than five minutes, just by choosing colours and styles, with no need to speak geek.

Upload photos and videos, and voila, a little piece of legacy for only USD$8.99 per month.

Now you just have to get your real estate license.

Read more at www.babyjellybeans.com

View our website at www.bancroftbunch.com

Your Facebook albums are the envy of all your friends and your Flickr photostream is a work of art. Now, thanks to Animoto, you can make a wicked movie trailer from your holiday snaps.

The concept is genius and addictive. Simply upload your photos, write a headline or two, choose background music from its (admittedly random) selection and click create. In a few minutes, Animoto will analyze your images and animate them perfectly to your music.

Invest in a $30 all-access pass for a year or create an unlimited number of half-minute videos for free. We think it’s a perfect idea for birthdays, reunions and stagettes.

Best of all? Like haute couture, no two videos will ever be quite the same.

www.animoto.com

Spring has barely sprung but already Toronto’s gourmets have begun their search at high-end green grocers for the first sign of wild garlic. Delicious raw or lightly cooked, you can tuck the leaves into cheese sandwiches, scatter them over soups or mix them into scrambled eggs.

Here’s our recipe for perfect spring-is-coming skordalia dip:

Ingredients
2 large, floury potatoes
1 big handful of wild garlic leaves (about 30 g), finely chopped
Juice of ½ lemon
1 tsp white-wine vinegar
200 ml extra-virgin olive oil
Fine sea salt

Method
Boil the potatoes and mash until super smooth.
Stir in the wild garlic, lemon juice and vinegar.
Pour in the olive oil, beating as you go, until you have a very smooth, silky paste.
Season with a little salt and serve with pita bread, grilled fish or roast chicken.

Fancy yourself the next Shepard Fairey?

Aspiring silk-screeners should check out Julian Finkel’s twice-monthly Kensington Market workshops ($175, includes 2 T-shirts and supplies).

Held in the basement of his eclectic boutique, Finkel teaches students how to stretch, coat, and shoot a full sized professional silkscreen. From illustrators to left-handed accountants from Whitby, all types of burgeoning artists are welcome.

Next up: MoMA.

At Model Citizen, 279 Augusta Ave., Toronto. Contact Finkel at 416-553-6632 for details.

How-to create a customized facial cleanser.

Muscovites protect their complexions with crushed berries while Vietnamese women swear by tamarind paste. Cheap, natural, bespoke – great beauty products need not always come in chic glass bottles.

To make the perfect cleanser, mix equal parts sweet almond and olive oil with five drops of lavender essential oil in a 250ml container. Warm a small amount between your palms and massage gently into your forehead, nose and cheeks. Take a flannel or muslin cloth dipped in warm water and wipe your face in circular motions, gently exfoliating the skin while you do so.

Try oils from either Maison Orphee or Aura cacia sold at Noah’s Natural Foods, 322 Bloor St. W., Toronto, 416-968-7930, www.noahsnaturalfoods.ca