Dubai-based gardener Patty Gay on the right ingredients for a garden

Meet a Dubai-based gardener who has turned her property into an oasis of trees, flowers, herbs and vegetables, many of which she uses as ingredients for cooking.

Patty Gay harvests cherry tomatoes, and develops recipes using fresh ingredients, sourced from her garden. Anna Nielsen for The National

In three years, Patty Gay has turned the virgin territory of the sandy back yard of her Silicon Oasis home into a pretty, thriving garden, abundant with trees, flowers, herbs and ­vegetables.

Surprisingly, Gay was entirely new to gardening when she took up residence at the villa with her husband, Thierry, and teenage daughter, Isabela. She started with the lawn, and took things from there, experimenting and learning what would and wouldn’t work.

“When I first started, I didn’t even know that tomatoes had lots of varieties. I didn’t know plant biology. I had no clue. I think that it’s important to begin simple and small, as I did, because that way you are more likely to succeed,” she advises.

Read more: Three recipes to try by gardener Patty Gay

Perhaps it’s Gay’s keen interest in cooking that has aided her development as a gardener. She’s a brand ambassador for Lootah Premium Foods, and works on projects for them, developing recipes using artisanal ingredients. The mark of a good cook, once you have base knowledge, is that you play with the principles to develop and create something new; it’s the same with horticulture, because you experiment with soil conditions, availability of light and the weather.

“My first love is cooking, so I’m always trying to incorporate whatever I grow into my cooking as well,” says Gay, who started propagating herbs to ensure that she always had a fresh supply of ingredients to hand that didn’t cost “an arm and a leg”.

Three months ago, she founded Rice and Baguette (the name is a reflection of her family’s French Filipino heritage), a blog that shares her knowledge and ideas about food, as well as some of her related gardening experiences.

The initiative is a continuation of a project she began with her friend, the Dubai Eye radio presenter Suzanne Radford, who knew of Gay’s keen interest in cooking and gardening, and asked her to collaborate with other gardeners on a grow-your-own campaign for the radio station last year and early this year. The campaign encouraged listeners to embrace healthy living and sustainability by sharing gardening knowledge and tips.

Gay, who describes herself as “not technical”, is still relatively new to the world of social media and blogging, yet she’s applied her horticultural principles to the process. “It’s the same as gardening; in the beginning you are quite hesitant, as you don’t really know how to do it, then you get the hang of it and you see the benefits,” she says. Gay also uses Instagram, and is enjoying connecting with like-minded people.

At home, Gay’s oasis-like garden extends the family’s entertaining space beyond the interior of the house. As her husband works locally, he’s able to return home for lunch, and they enjoy eating in the garden when weather permits, retiring to the red beanbags on the lawn to enjoy a cup of coffee together – French style.

A shady, Asian-inspired corner takes on a tropical feel and pays homage to Gay’s childhood in the Philippines. Planted here are banana trees, palms, a drumstick tree (Moringa oleifera), papaya, aloe vera, mango, fig, pandan and a miniature orange tree (which has tiny blossoms that can be incorporated into cooking for intense flavour, in teas or desserts).

At various points in the garden, there are vegetable planters cleverly constructed from recycled wooden pallets. The look is as appealing as it is practical, ­making it easier on the back when Gay tends to the herbs and vegetables planted there. It’s also space-­saving, with some of the pallets propped up against the wall to form informal vertical gardens.

Gay’s husband is involved in a couple of import businesses, and he’s been a valuable source for the pallets, as well as playing handyman to fix them together. The completed planting boxes were lined with porous furnishing fabrics to retain the soil and allow for water drainage – all achieved for a fraction of the cost that the couple would pay for similar containers available ­commercially.

Once the boxes were filled with a combination of potting soil blended with sweet red sand, Gay began experimenting with seedlings that she started off in seed trays in August and began planting out last September, as well as introducing some other established plants.

Growing in the containers are specimens of rosemary, several types of tomatoes, parsley, spring onions, basil, chives, dill, cauliflower, lettuces, peppers, coriander, thyme, bak choi, chillies and strawberries.

There was evidence of caterpillars on some of the basil plants, but Gay doesn’t like spraying, so she picks off what she finds when she can. To protect ripening tomatoes from the attention of pecking birds, they’re either held in sealed plastic bags or, for bigger specimens, wrapped in a piece of cut-off stocking.

The plant containers are fed with organic turkey manure pellets, which are left on the surface of the soil along with homemade compost produced from green kitchen waste.

Pumpkins and melons were also planted in the containers, but soon after harvesting three or four pumpkins, it became very apparent that these were plants that needed to branch out. Next season, they will be allowed to expand freely in an alternative, non-contained location.

The most recent addition to the garden is a synthetic lawn, which was purchased for Dh1,850, ­including installation, sourced from a company based at Dragon Mart, where different varieties are sold by the roll. Contractors came to put the grass into position, then pinned it in place, in the space of an afternoon. The individual blades of grass are graduated in colour, so the blades are lighter at the base, making them look more authentic.

“In the beginning, I really resisted the temptation of fake grass, but now, I am so glad that I did it, because we are already saving Dh1,000 a month in water charges and it always looks clean,” Gay says. “Previously, because of the trees growing around the border, much of the lawn area was shaded, so it took a great deal of effort and expense to keep the natural grass looking green.”

Another recent addition to Gay’s garden has been a number of edible flowers growing in terracotta pots on the terrace, which she harvests and uses to great effect in her dishes – creating plated gardens in miniature. There are a wide range of edible flowers available, which can be bought either as small plants or grown from seeds (ideally, your sources will be accredited as heirloom or organic). A basic edible flower garden could include sweet williams, marigolds, pansies, calendulas, nasturtiums and borages, as well as the little flowers that appear at the top of basil plants and courgette flowers.

It’s inspiring that a relatively new gardener has created such an established and mature garden space in a relatively short period of time.

“I like having nice nails, but when I do my blog, I have shots of my hands in the dirt – it’s important to emphasise making connections with the soil,” Gay laughs. “Somebody once asked me: ‘Do you always have to sing to your plants, they are so beautiful?’ I responded that the plants are so beautiful, they make me sing.”