You Grow Girl™

- From: BITCH Magazine Spring 2005

“How can you not be inspired by a gardening guru who sports a Joy Division t-shirt, a practical (and stylish) homemade gardening apron, and cat-eye glasses? Taking cues from feminist DIY manifestos like Stitch n’ Bitch and Get Crafty, Gayla Trail, creator of YouGrowGirl.com, invites you to take it outside. Don’t have a ayard? Don’t worry — Trail offers up a weatlth of info on guerilla gardening on city streets and vacant loys, community gardening, container gardening in wondow boxes or on fire escapes, as well as full-on backyard planting. You Grow Girl covers everything you need to know about developing a green thumb, from soil conditions to seed starting to pest management to composting, and more. Ample photos and Leela Corman’s cute, clear illustrations provide helpful visual cues, not to mention a pleasing read.” -R.F.

-page 74

-From: The National Post (March 26, 2005.)

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-From: ReadyMade (March/April 2005.)

“In most cities, people outnumber plants. Urbanites seeking to correct the sprout-to-person ratio will find their action plan in Gayla Trail’s inspired book. Trail, who founded the hip, how-to site www.yougrowgirl.com in 2000, schools clueless downtowners on how to plan, grow, and maintain a mini garden on a windowsill or rooftop. Combining a renter’s pragmatism (one chapter covers planting on fire escapes) with a designer’s eye (she recommends the dramatic, spiky agave for its modernist good looks), Trail’s field guide is ideal for those who prefer a green ghetto to a manicured lawn.” – page 16

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.”