Gayla Trail, author of the most beginner-friendly garden book I own, You Grow Girl, has a new one under her garden belt and I’m so excited to be able to offer up a copy to you.
;)
Grow Great Grub is a friendly, practical primer on container and small-space organic gardening. Gayla takes you through the step-by-step process of growing food that’s good for you and good for the planet without costing you an arm and a leg. I love her creative, improvisational alternatives to going out and buying a bunch of stuff, some of which I’ve employed with success, like her toilet tube seed-starting method and managing to eat from our back-deck, bucket garden last year.
Here are some of the things I particularly love about this book:
- Her focus on windowsill growing, for those of us without even a stoop or balcony to our rental agreement
- She lays out which plastics to avoid when selecting/crafting DIY container garden bins (leaching issues)
- The side-boxes that accompany all the plant varieties and give you specific details on how to grow each plant in a pot successfully
- The whole fruit chapter!
- Her suggestion of the insanely cute idea to freeze edible herb flowers inside ice cubes for a pretty and refreshing lift in your iced tea or water.
- Great suggestions on short and long-term storage of the things you grow (that is, if bounty is a ‘problem’ for you!)
- She has a great community forum for Q & A or specific issues you encounter that are not in the book.
So, let’s get down to business. Clarkson Potter has been so kind as to ship a copy of this book to the winner, but they can only ship to the US and Canada. To enter, post a comment below telling us: What you’re excited to grow this year and what kind of gardening you do (or plan to start doing), i.e. you’ve got actual ground, containers on the roof, windowsills, a guerilla garden, etc.
Comments close on Tuesday, March 8 at midnight CST. I will select a winner via random.org. Please don’t forget to include your email address in the little box that asks for it on the comment form so I can contact you if you win; don’t worry, other readers won’t see it.
Kate