Grow your own

Author Gayla Trail preaches the
urban-garden gospel

BEYOND THE LAWN: Small-scale gardening

by MATTHEW HAYS

Gayla Trail says her childhood was spent without much green space at all. “I grew up in a town house,” recalls the Toronto-based author, journalist and gardener. “There was probably only room for a garden the size of a postage stamp in the entire complex.”

But Trail—a fitting moniker for a gardening enthusiast, but it’s her real name—soon found herself turned on to the joys of growing one’s own by her grandmother. “My grandmother came here as a senior citizen from the West Indies. She had a tiny balcony in her apartment. But she put some buckets out and was growing things. I realized one of the things she was growing was a potato plant. That blew my mind—until then I had thought potatoes were brown lumps you got at the grocery store. I had no idea you could actually grow them yourself.”

Trail says there’s something about a Western cultural mindset that seems to suggest that you can only grow things out in the country. She says it’s some kind of unwritten rule, pointing to the fact that people who are most likely to have urban gardens are immigrants from other parts of the world. “There’s almost something repressed about it,” she jokes. “It’s like we just feel we don’t have the right space, so can’t do it.”

Trail now makes a living by teaching others about just how simple growing your own food can be, even in confined condos or apartments. Her latest book, Grow Great Grub: Organic Food From Small Spaces, combines loads of basic advice on starting your own urban garden to recipes for your ultimate harvest.

Trail says many in our generation were put off the idea of gardening by a basic element of suburban life: the lawn. “Lawns are all about perfection, conformity and homogeny. And they weren’t even good for the environment. If people grew up with the labour-intensive act of having to mow the lawn once a week, they just have a bad association with gardening.”

And she says that perfect-lawn memory is probably what deters people from embarking on their own gardening. “There really isn’t such a thing as a green thumb or a black thumb. People say they don’t want to try it because they always kill plants and think they’re going to be bad at it. It’s a learning process. You can’t be afraid to make mistakes. Even seasoned gardeners kill plants sometimes—it happens.”

But she says finding converts gets easier all the time. Interest in creating rooftop gardens, communal neighbourhood gardens or just growing in your window is growing, as faith in produce we buy in shops wavers.

Trail says home-growing produce is rich and satisfying. “There is great pride in eating something you’ve grown yourself. I think it’s mentally and physically healthy. And it’s much more rewarding than picking up something at the grocery store.”

A final question, one that has haunted me for decades: does talking to your plants actually work? “I’m not sure. I don’t really think so, but if you’re talking to them, it means you’re observing them and paying attention to them, and probably as a result caring for them more. The more you are observing them and caring for them, the better off they’ll be.”

GROW GREAT GRUB: ORGANIC FOOD
FROM SMALL SPACES BY GAYLA TRAIL,
CLARKSON POTTER, 208PP, $19.99