My mother just mailed me this book. It has a lot of glossy pictures. The girl who wrote it kind of has my dream job (and definitely has had an assortment of my dream apartments – the kind that have a deck or roof for container gardening!) 

The author, Gayla Trail, also runs this great blog  where you can see lots of wonderful photographs of plants and her various urban gardening results. She’s a brave lady, gardening up in Ontario, where the growing season is so short. It makes me feel even worse, knowing that you can literally grow year round here – and I could easily be eating my own produce, and saving money – right now if I had only the slimmest access to a sunny patch of concrete, roof, deck, yard, or stoop.

Unfortunately, our apartment building is a form of psychological torture as I cannot get down all six flights of stairs on my own power (still recovering from the broken foot), thereby cancelling out any dreams of neighborhood community gardens – our apartment is darker than a cellar, and though we have a gorgeous, sunny, hot, thousands of square feet roof with access and a door, our landlord simply won’t allow us up there! He lives in the building, otherwise there would obviously already be crates of fresh herbs sunning themselves up there. 

Anyway, its much like another glossy and colorful photo-filled gardening book I recently read, Garden Anywhere by Alys Fowler.  Lots of cute ideas for potting plants in used coffee containers and storage bins, lovely shots of sunny windows and with the light filtering through the root hairs of plants in vintage glass jars. Its all enough to make me want to cry.