dirt under the nails

Here's a place to document musings on successes and failures in gardening and attempts to cultivate some larger meaning from working with land and making things grow and eating them and how it relates to what's going on in the world in regards to food production, population, climate change, peak oil, and global and local politics. I've been gardening on and off for a few years in Florida but the idea to document it as some sort of political statement was largely inspired by the Edible Estates project by Fritz Haeg. Here's an excerpt:

Edible Estates is an attack on the front lawn and everything it has come to represent!

Edible Estates is an ongoing series of projects to replace the front lawn with edible garden landscapes responsive to culture, climate, context and people!

Edible Estates reconciles issues of global food production and urbanized land use with the modest gesture of a small domestic garden!

Edible Estates is a provocation, a call to arms and a radical intervention on the banal, repressive streets of zombie lawn-lined monotony!

Edible Estates is nothing new, growing our own food is the first thing we did when we stopped being nomadic and started being "civilized"!
Edible Estates is a practical food producing initiative, a place-responsive landscape design proposal, a scientific horticultural experiment, a conceptual land-art project, a defiant political statement, a community out-reach program and an act of radical gardening!

The Edible Estates project proposes the replacement of the domestic front lawn with a highly productive edible landscape. Food grown in our front yards will connect us to the seasons, the organic cycles of the earth, and our neighbors. The banal lifeless space of uniform grass in front of the house will be replaced with the chaotic abundance of biodiversity. In becoming gardeners we will reconsider our connection to the land, what we take from it, and what we put in it. Each yard will be a unique expression of its location and of the inhabitant and his or her desires.

I'm not a "dirt god," I just thought the name sounded cool. My first choice: Dirt Under My Nails, turned out to be already in use as a gardening blog. Lots of people have dirt under their nails it appears. And that's a good thing. But how many Dirt Gods are there? There's one more, as there always is on the internet, but I spell mine with 2 "t"s so don't get confused, not that anyone would as the other dirt god has nothing on his blog since he started it in 2003. But I digress...

I'm far from a gardening expert so if anyone comes across this I welcome input, advice, and comments. Part of the reason for this is to network with other gardeners and share stuff. Over the course of the next several months I'll be gardening at my house and with a group of students I work with at a community school. This is where I'll put down how it's going.