Cindy McNatt's Dirt du Jour is a Daily Candy for the gardening girl (or guy)

Dirt du Jour is a daily gardening e-mail newsletter that started up in March. It shows up in one's inbox with a cute illustration, a cool gardening idea, and a daily recommended read. Like Daily Candy, it looks good and it reads quickly, but unlike the popular shopping newsletter, it is about the increasingly trendy and recession friendly topic of gardening in Southern California.

Dirt du Jour is the brainchild of Cindy McNatt, garden columnist for the Orange County Register (although she is doing this project on her own)."You can tell by looking at the website that I kind of snagged the Daily Candy model," she said. "I'm not a shopper, but I thought their format could really work for gardening."

So far it seems to be working quite well. The website and newsletter have been up and running only since March, but McNatt already has 2,000 subscribers and says her site gets about 3,000 hits a day. The majority of her readers are based in Los Angeles, according to Google analytics.

McNatt sends the daily missives herself before heading off to work each morning, but she is already thinking about expansion. "The only thing that could hold me back is that it is regional," she said. "The way to grow it is to find contributors in other parts of the country."

Dig around in Dirt du Jour for yourself: www.dirtdujour.com.

-- Deborah Netburn

Photo credit: Courtesy of Cindy McNatt