Ron Finley was home by the pool recently when his thoughts once again turned to dirt.

“People need to realize how powerful the transformation of soil can be,” he said, with a hint of evangelism. “We’ve gotten so far away from our food source. It’s been hijacked from us. But if you get soil, plant something in it and water it, you can feed yourself. It’s that simple.”

Finley’s two-story house in South Los Angeles used to be headquarters for a swimming school but the pool was drained long ago to make way for greener dreams. Potted cactuses, bags of organic fertilizer and gardening equipment cluttered the shallow end. Graffiti emblazoned its once-white walls. Old shopping carts planted with succulents lined the pool’s edge.

“We’re going to do a parade with a hundred of these to show you can repurpose the carts instead of just junking them,” he said.

It was early afternoon, and Finley, who is tall, extroverted and disinclined to give his age (he has two sons in their 20s), had been up since dawn dealing with emails, invitations and other byproducts of what he called “the TED effect.” Last winter at TED, the annual ideas confab in Long Beach, his rousing 10-minute talk about guerrilla gardening in low-income neighborhoods was the hug-your-neighbor presentation of the week, and Finley was suddenly the man to meet.

“I should have brought a stripper pole and had people throw money at me,” said Finley, who juggles jobs as a fitness trainer and fashion designer to support his passion for gardening. He does not receive a salary for his work at L.A. Green Grounds, the volunteer organization he helped found three years ago to install vegetable gardens in vacant lots and sidewalk medians in blighted areas.

TED was a world apart.

“Sergey Brin from Google was standing there clapping,” he said, “Benedikt Taschen was inviting me to his Hollywood parties, and Goldie Hawn wanted to say hi and kiss me. I kept thinking, what am I doing here?”

Since then, Finley has been thrust into the unlikely role of pavement-pounding Johnny Appleseed. His talk has received almost 900,000 views on TED’s website, and his message that edible gardens are the antidote to inner-city health issues, poverty and gang violence (“if you ain’t a gardener, you ain’t gangsta,” he told the crowd) has gone supernova.

Talk show host Carson Daly, actress Rashida Jones and celebrated Danish chef Rene Redzepi were among hundreds of new admirers issuing shoutouts on Twitter.

Alice Waters stopped by Finley’s house, Russell Brand put him on his late-night talk show, and corporations like Reebok, Disney, Stihl and Toms Shoes had collaboration ideas. A graduate student asked to write a dissertation about Finley, who, to his credit, has kept an eyebrow arched over his newfound fame.

“All the attention in the world won’t do my dishes,” he said.

“Ron is compelling, funny and completely authentic in his quest to redefine what’s possible in areas where there’s no nature to be seen,” said Chris Anderson, the TED curator who helped select Finley as one of 34 speakers discovered during a worldwide talent search that drew thousands of applicants last year. “He takes on the depressing narrative that our inner cities are irretrievably decaying. Watching him fight back rewires your worldview.”

Finley, who grew up with seven siblings near the intersection of Florence and Normandie avenues, where the 1992 Los Angeles riots began, aligns more with graffiti artists like Risk and Retna, both friends of Finley’s, than with English horticulturalists of yore. Neat rows of zucchini are for grandmas. His gardens have spirals, color, fragrance and curves, and, to him, soil is sensuous.

“How much more sexy can it get than you eating food that you grew?” Finley asked.

In a city where an elite few fuss over $13 plates of escarole wedges, too many others eat at 98-cent stores and drive-thrus or go hungry altogether. Finley estimates that the city of Los Angeles owns 26 square miles of vacant lots, an area equivalent to 20 Central Parks, with enough space for 724,838,400 tomato plants.

His radical fix is to take back that land and plant it, even if it’s the skinny strip between concrete and curb.

It was the barren 150-by-10-foot median outside Finley’s house that inspired his first act of crab grass defiance. In 2010, he planted a sidewalk garden to reduce grocery expenses and to avoid the 45-minute round-trip to Whole Foods.

“I wanted a carrot without toxic ingredients I didn’t know how to spell,” he said.

A few months later, neighbors were gawking in delight at the sight of pumpkins, peppers, sunflowers, kale and corn in an area better known for hubcap shops. Late one night, Finley, who is a single father, noticed a mother and daughter sneaking food from his garden. He conceived L.A. Green Grounds as a way to share the abundance with people like them.

The city was less magnanimous. As do other metropolitan areas, Los Angeles owns the “parkways” that run alongside the curb, and the Bureau of Street Services cited Finley for gardening on his median without the required $400 permit.

Outraged, he and a band of green-thumbed activists petitioned a member of the City Council, who persuaded the city to back off.

“People in my neighborhood are so disconnected from the fresh food supply that kids don’t know an eggplant from a sweet potato,” Finley said. “We have to show them how to get grounded in the truest sense of the word.”