Growing Great Grub in Small Spaces
Story and Photography by Laura Berman

Gayla Trail’s new book, Grow Great Grub: Organic Food from Small Spaces, couldn’t have come at a better time.  Interest in growing our own has mushroomed in the past year and Grow Great Grub has everything you need to select, plant, cultivate, harvest and preserve your own food organically, especially if you only have a small space to do it in.

Trail, known to her legion of fans as You Grow Girl, has been writing about all aspects of gardening for more than ten years on her widely read website, daily blog and book of the same name. A worldwide community of gardeners has literally grown up around her.

Grow Great Grub concentrates on growing organic food in small spaces – balconies, rooftops, patios, windowsills, planter boxes, community plots – so it’s a real godsend to city gardeners. But that shouldn’t stop those more spatially endowed from adding it to their libraries.  It’s clear that Trail knows what she’s talking about and this know-how flows effortlessly from the page. Reminiscent of the cookbooks of Elizabeth David, her stories of daily life as a city gardener educate and entertain in a voice all her own. It’s also a beautiful and well-designed book, liberally illustrated with Trail’s own sublime photographs taken in her tiny, perfect Toronto rooftop garden and only slightly larger community plot.

She starts you off right at the very beginning –growing in the ground or in containers, choosing and starting seeds, making the best soil mix for your small space, using organic fertilizers, dealing (organically) with insects and other marauders, the hows and whens of harvesting, and the ways of keeping that harvest. And of course there are the vegetables, fruits and edible flowers, every one of which Trail has actually grown herself. It’s like having an amazingly good gardener as a close friend.  She knows what you need to know before you do.

I’ve grown food my entire life, much of it in the same kind of spaces as Trail. Yet I learn something new with every page. Gayla Trail’s Grow Great Grub will appeal to the novice and experienced gardener alike and you’ll enjoy every readable minute of it!

Laura Berman (www.greenfusephotos.com) is a photographer of farms, gardens, markets, kitchens and the people who grow and prepare local food. She is also a landscape designer and lifelong gardener of small urban spaces. Laura wrote about and organized community gardens for over ten years while working at FoodShare Toronto.

Grow Great Grub: Organic Food from Small Spaces by Gayla Trail.  Clarkson Potter/Publishers, 2010.