The man who washed Jay Leno's hair with oatmeal and got Barbara Walters to wrap a wet diaper around her head is coming to the Maryland Home & Garden Show this weekend at the Maryland State Fairgrounds in Timonium.

Joey Green, the "mad scientist of clean" who comes up with improbable uses for brand-name products, including shaving with peanut butter, is the headliner this weekend. He will show visitors how to clean carpet stains with Pampers, how to polish jewelry with Alka-Seltzer and how to clean a dishwasher with Tang.

Green was an advertising writer with J. Walter Thompson in New York and writing ads for Burger King when he was asked to help brainstorm new uses for a client, Nestea.

"I thought it was the dumbest thing," he says. "Then people in the room started suggesting 'tenderizing meat' and 'deodorizing rooms' and 'curing sunburn pain.' "

One of the men in the room said he had dumped a jar into his bathtub and soaked in it after suffering bad sunburn while sailing.

"When people asked me for my craziest story in advertising, the Nestea story was it. Then I became a magnet for those kinds of stories," Green says from his home in Los Angeles.

Customers write to manufacturers all the time, he said, suggesting alternate uses for their products, and manufacturers never do anything with those ideas.

So he went to the grocery store, bought 30 or 40 common items, started digging into company files and doing research into alternate uses. He locked himself in a library and wrote a book.

That was 10 books ago. Since then, he's written about kitchen cures and garden magic. His latest is "Joey Green's Fix-It Magic: More Than 1,971 Quick-and-Easy Household Solutions Using Brand-Name Products."

"Polishing furniture with Spam? That was actually in the New York Times Magazine," he said. "I'll be demonstrating that at the show."

Next weekend, the second for the show, Jeff "Mole Hunter" Holper will share tips and strategies for homeowners in their fight against pests. Holper has more than 10,000 mole "kills" to his credit.

Those are just two of the dozen or more seminars with home and garden pros covering topics such as landscaping, solar energy, quick-cook meals and kitchen design at the annual show.

Covering more than 150,000 square feet in the fairgrounds expo hall, the show will also include display gardens and outdoor living spaces designed to illustrate this year's theme, "Wine and Dine Al Fresco," and to show homeowners how to create peaceful living spaces out of doors.

Among the 400 exhibitors are 150 crafts people as well as vendors showcasing the latest in fixtures, finishes, appliances, flooring, wall and window treatments, spas, closet and garage organizers and home theater electronics.