City Gardening

In small city gardens, it’s often a challenge to find enough space to grow all the ornamental plants you love, let alone veggies and herbs. And if you live in an apartment, it takes a certain dedication not only to find enough space to grow, but to surmount drying winds and scorching temperatures to bring in the harvest.

But, for intrepid urban gardener, Gayla Trail (and her online persona You Grow Girl), ingenuity and frugality combine with a passion for plants to transform garbage cans to containers, dresser drawers to planters and rooftops into gardens filled with heirloom vegetables and unusual herbs. Recently, Gayla spoke at a Parkdale Horticultural Society meeting and showed how she does it and what she grows. Here are 12 good things she said that have inspired me to try converting a corner of my yard into a mini-veggie garden this year.

1. Shiso, or perilla, is a herb plant with wonderful purple foliage. Brew the leaves into an iced tea with a fruity, minty flavour. It’s also used to dye ginger pink (the kind served with sushi).

2. Whippersnapper is one of the earliest tomatoes to mature and grows well in containers. Gayla harvests hers in July.

3. Gayla reuses her potting soil from year to year, amending it with compost (especially vermicompost) and rotating her crops.

4. To conserve water, she grows in very large containers which don’t need watering as often as smaller ones do. She also places tall plants at the back of her rooftop garden as a wind break.

5. She hardens off seedlings by placing them in a sheltered gazebo; first for a few hours a day, and gradually increasing their exposure to the outdoors over two weeks. Although it takes extreme patience to do this, she says it really pays off in healthy plants.

6. Clear plastic takeaway containers with lids make great mini “greenhouses” for starting seeds.

7. Peppers, either sweet or hot, need deep containers to accommodate their roots. Gayla grows them in her collection of sap buckets.

8. All of her containers have holes in the bottom for drainage. To make them, she hammers a large nail through the metal bottoms of sap buckets, garbage cans and other metal containers.

9. Yes, she manages to grow strawberries in a strawberry pot! But she also recommends growing Dianthus, which can take the dry conditions.

10. Purple bush basil has tiny leaves that burst with flavour — try it!

11. Sow lettuce in “lettuce balls” constructed of two wire hanging baskets, lined with coir, filled with soil and wired together. Covered all over in leafy lettuce, they look like giant, edible green powder puffs!

12. Grow potatoes in garbage cans by placing a bit of soil in the bottom (don’t forget the drainage holes, and Gayla places the can on top of the upturned, brick-lined garbage can lid which serves as a saucer); then plant the bits of potatoes and cover with a thin layer of soil; as the potatoes sprout, add more soil until it reaches the top of the can and the potato leaves tumble over the rim.

Galya’s working on her next book, so watch for it soon!