At heart, Alison Gross is a teacher. Gross created Gardening Guru, what she calls a consultant-style business, to help black and green thumbs alike in their gardening efforts. In many cases, the gardens start off as patches of unused dirt, a corner of untamed yard, but after she visits long sprouts of lettuce and arugula start to push through in organized lines.
That was the story of her first Park City garden, an abandoned corner of a friend’s yard where a hot tub had been sitting for more than a few years. Gross came tools-in-hand, ready to cover the basics of high-altitude gardening.
“You start off simple and eventually develop something more complex,” Gross said, “but I try to always design in a way that’s more or less for a lazy gardener, a simple system with the maximum yield.”
Oftentimes, it comes down to simple knowledge implemented properly. Plan the garden. Use companion planting, a system that feeds the soil rather than robbing it of its nutrients. Start small, start with tougher plants such as lettuce.
“You’re creating an ecosystem,” Gross said. “The soil is the most important part of the garden. I’m hoping that when people call I can teach them to how to compost properly or even how to plant a seed, the sizes of the seed or how deep to plant it.”
Before long, Gross helped her friend cultivate 30 different varieties of vegetables and herbs. That summer, mint was quickly tossed into teas and fresh beets were only steps away from the kitchen. Only a small handful of plants failed, a basic truth of gardening, but with the warm spring this year trickier vegetables such as spinach were growing before other seeds were in the ground.
“It’s so much fun when something comes to harvest and you can actually eat it,” Gross said. “The food tastes so much better than anything in the store and there’s no big secret to it. It’s just fresh.”
Self-described as an “extreme gardener,” Gross has worked in some of the most inhospitable climates. From Israeli deserts to Utah frosts, she’s learned how to do more with less. Less water. Less time in the season. And it’s molded her into an confident experimenter, she said.
“You start off simple and eventually develop something more complex,” Gross said. “I try to always design in a way that’s more or less for a lazy gardener, a simple system with the maximum yield.”
“The first thing I ever grew was lettuce,” she added, “and I literally just sprinkled seeds into the ground like salt and pepper and asked them to grow. And they did, a lot of them.”
Her career as an organic gardener followed that simple to complex development. It started with lettuce, but grew into a stint in Israel studying permaculture, learning organic gardening techniques in Arizona and working with the Summit County Community Garden in Snyderville Basin.
“I found connecting with nature through gardening, and it was even more rewarding than hiking and biking,” Gross said. “Being able to plant seeds in ground and watch them grow was a nurturing aspect of my personality that I was never able to tap into before. Through gardening, I was able to create something new.”
The goal with Gardening Guru is to raise a sense of awareness in the value of home gardening, she said, to create ecological spaces for people to enjoy, to remember where the food we eat comes from. In conjunction with her business Gross created a blog this month to help clients. Whether it’s a frost alert or how to order seeds, she’ll be delving into the world of organic gardening.
“We have to have compassion with what we are doing,” Gross said. “The intention should not be to harvest everything you plant. It’s to learn what grows best.”
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