From: LATimes (March 10, 2005.)
The dirt on alt gardening
by Alexandria Abramian-Mott
“Looking for an antidote to the gardening how-to book written by estate-owning bluebloods with eponymous tea roses? Gayla Trail, a bona fide alt chick with the cat glasses and obscure ’80s rock T-shirts to prove it, has the dirt. She has distilled the gardening process into a series of bite-sized, quirkily written sections for a new generation of land- and time-deprived DIY females (males, too, if you skip the parts about growing loofa sponges and making peppermint foot scrubs.) Don’t have a patch of dirt to call your own? A fire escape or a window sill will do, writes Trail, who devotes many pages to container gardening.
The book is high on practical advice and written for an instant-messaging generation looking for snapshots, not diatribes, of information. All you need to know about soil pH levels is distilled into one short paragraph while sewing a funky gardening apron is given two pages.
Blended in with the basics are Trail’s homegrown ideas, such as starting seeds in Jell-O, burying wine bottles upside down to border a path and planting a garden for pets (her cat is named  what else?  Volton). She even suggests scooping up droppings left from police horses for free manure and practicing guerrilla gardening  growing plants on public property  as a way of fostering a green thumb.
Bluebloods need not apply.”
