I promised a blog entry on my new gig at DigTheDirt. I’ll walk you through who we are and what we’re trying to do.
After the struggling economy throttled back donations and the business models around ChangingThePresent and ClassWish led to that company being stripped down to one, I found myself looking for a new gig. Gardening and a down economy go together like hot dogs, bailouts and apple pie.
DigTheDirt isn’t really a full time gig for me, at least not yet. It’s a privately funded project started by Cliff Sharples, the founder of Garden.com (now defunct). The whole model for the site is evolving, but I can tell you that the emphasis is on a user-generated database where plant attributes can grow and evolve based on the votes of gardeners. You see, plants are separated into USDA plant hardiness zones where they strive the best, but the characteristics of a plant may change from zone to zone, and even within a zone in small pockets called micro-climates.
At digthedirt, we solve that problem by adjusting data as users vote on whether a plant thrives. As our database matures, gardeners will be able to search our database about what’s planted nearby, and the ideal growing conditions.
We are also easy to search. A user can look at DigTheDirt and find deerproof plants that bloom red and thrive in full sun and dry, alkaline soil. We are seeding the database with a core of some 8000 plants, and we’re already starting to get some gardener contributions.
Of course, we’re building on Ruby on Rails. I’ll talk more about the implementation of the project in weeks to come. Stay tuned.