The land was always a commons. We are making it one again.
Water, food, and craft used to be shared. A whole community kept them, and a whole community lived on them.
Then we got a yard fed from a chemical bag and walled off from the neighbors. A small, sad version of land that once belonged to everyone.
We think that was a bad trade — for the land and for the body that lives on it.
So we're putting the old way back: land tended together, by hand.
None of this is new. For centuries across the Southwest and Mexico, towns ran their water in common through the acequia — the shared ditch, dug and cleaned and defended by everyone it fed. It had a steward, the mayordomo. And every spring there was la saca: the day the whole village turned out to clear the channel by hand. Nobody paid a bill. You showed up, and the water was yours because you kept it running.
Next to it grew the huerta de atrio — the mission orchard and kitchen garden in the courtyard, where the food, the shade, and the gathering all sat on one piece of ground. Modern life pulled those apart. We're putting them back together, with this region's own plants and our own hands.
La saca, brought back.
Show up and work the land with us — a bioswale, a huerta, a native planting — the way the village turned out for the ditch. No experience needed, no fee. You go home having built something real, next to people you didn't know that morning. Start here.
Sign up for the next one →From hands to trade.
Keep showing up and you can learn a real trade — Land, Stone, Water, or Clay — on a path from volunteer to apprentice to paid hand. This work pays a living, and we teach it the old way: by doing it, next to someone who already knows how.
See the craft track →Teach the teacher.
The method is open on purpose. Everything we know — how to read a property, build a bioswale, grow a native huerta — lives in the Source library and the Field Guide. Take it. Run your own Dirt Day, on your own ground. You don't need our permission.
Take the method →Every commons has one thing the whole community keeps — the ditch, the orchard, the herd. Ours is a map of restored ground: every bioswale that hands a street its water back, every native huerta, every yard pulled off the chemical drip. Each Dirt Day adds to it. Each person who takes the method somewhere new adds to it too. The more people join, the bigger it gets — which is the whole point.
We don't build a commons by ourselves. We've worked alongside programs that put people and land back together at once, and we want to do a lot more of it.
With YES we stood up a temporary ecological field — goats and all — and trained people from the community and veterans to garden it. They left with a skill that stays in their hands. This was the craft track, years before we had a name for it.
We're opening a path for veterans into ecological work — honest, physical labor that's good for the land and good for the person doing it. Noon brings the ground, the method, and the structure. The veterans bring the rest. We partner with veteran organizations to make it real.
Run a program that puts people and land back together? Let's build a partnership →
A Dirt Day is where it starts — one Saturday, real ground, a real thing built by the end of it. Dates posted as they're scheduled. Come build it with us.
Join a Dirt Day → Or take the method and start your own — the Source library →