Creating your own urban farm is as simple as planting your flowerbeds with edibles. – Greg Peterson, My Ordinary Extraordinary Yard: The Story of the Urban Farm, 2009

We think that diamonds are very important, gold is very important, all these minerals are very important. We call them precious minerals, but they are all forms of the soil. But that part of this mineral that is on top, like it is the skin of the earth, that is the most precious of the commons. – Wangari Maathai (1940–2011), Dirt! The Movie, 2009

We have descended into the garden and caught three hundred slugs. How I love the mixture of the beautiful and the squalid in gardening. It makes it so lifelike. – Evelyn Underhill, Letters

Today I had set aside for spading. Now there is nothing pleasanter than spading when the ground is soft and damp. You turn a spade full and then carefully knock all the lumps to pieces and you go on for hours without thinking about anything. – John Steinbeck, letter to Kate Beswick