My Empire of Dirt: How One Man Turned His Big-City Backyard into a Farm

by Manny Howard

  My farm is not a pious exercise in sustainability. It is a calorie machine. I am a six-foot-four-inch-tall, forty-year-old man who, once upon a time, weighed 234 pounds. I am a big and enthusiastic eater. I am not hostile to the luxurious, if boggling, choice that the global food-delivery machine provides us. Based on condiments alone, my refrigerator would offer a four-star global culinary tour. So why turn my back on it?

  Because I know I am not the first guy to be plagued by a vague but persistent sense that the universe has been coming unstitched for some time, and that the destructive, if unquantifiable, process is continually accelerating. I am no innovator when it comes to providing a solution, a straightforward way to sew it all right back together. But I do believe that we have lost a fundamental connection to the food we eat—a confident understanding of not only where our food is from, but also what is in it.

  I am as casually creeped out by the clinical mechanization of the global food industry as any other middle-class dad who is grateful to be able to pay 120 percent more for grass-fed, hormone-free milk if it means keeping tits off my daughter until she reaches puberty. I am confident that one day pretty soon some sun-starved genius working in the bowels of Monsanto, or a similar food Death Star, will develop a Twinkie that shares most of its genome with broccoli, and I don’t like the idea one bit.

  Still, I don’t know if I side with the locavore, or his critic, who claims that the titans of agriculture have it right, that massive quantities of food packed inside cargo containers hauled aboard enormous trains (which advocates say carry unimaginably heavy loads 435 miles on one gallon of gasoline) and in the holds of oceangoing ships are much less wasteful in the long run than weekly—nay, daily—parades of local artisanal producers trundling off to greenmarkets in beater cargo vans or late-model Subaru station wagons to sell their certifiably wholesome foodstuffs to eager urbanites, holed up, isolated, and ignorant, without the means or practical skills necessary to raise or grow their own food.

  The news coverage, even the strikingly articulate, near-literary evaluations of what the locavore would like to call a movement, is arm’s-length. The analysis is often laced with antiurban sentiment and occasionally mythologizes rural America as the dime novels did the Wild West.

  Not that locavores and their scribes don’t achieve their goal. They do. Locavores successfully reject the presumptions that most of us make about the food we eat; they most certainly make themselves aware of its source and the conditions under which it is produced. This brings them closer to real food, food that is healthy, supports the hard work done on small farms, and supports quickly vanishing artisanal food crafts. Still, is that urban locavore with his string bag and his burning mission an activist or is he just shopping? I say he is not as engaged in politics as he believes. I say he’s making well-considered purchasing decisions.

  But I have less and less time for such pedantry now. The Farm will remove me from the consumer loop. The locavore’s dilemma is that, for all his thoughtful action, he’s still a consumer. The Farm will put me one step deeper, make me the producer. Once food is tied to work and not money, even—worst case—its scarcity will teach the family something. Anyway, how hard is it going to be to sustain myself?

  The Farm of my imagining is a closed system. That’s the project’s primary appeal. The available arable land may only be 800 square feet, but a 250-square-foot garage will make a fine barn, and its second bay will double as an outbuilding. In addition, I’ll put four planters on the front lawn. That’s it: the extent of my resources. If I don’t grow it here, I don’t eat it. If nothing grows, the theory is I starve—well, fail at the project at any rate. There is no room for extenuating, mitigating, or complicating circumstances. If entropy is the enemy—and, as always, entropy is most definitely the enemy—The Farm serves both as my weapon and my battlefield. On The Farm I will have clarity of purpose and an objective understanding of my progress. This might be true for the first time in my life. This prospect is exhilarating. On The Farm all the vagaries of my life will be stripped away. Finally, relief from all the unanswered, even the unanswerable, questions.

  Typically aggressive and devoutly unrealistic, I begin the planning phase of my farm immediately after winning approval from Lisa. No sooner has the planning officially commenced than my ambitions begin to carom from inspired practicality to absurd grandiosity.

  Most of the solutions to the problems presented by the limitation of space spring fully formed from my imagination. The plant nursery will be on the counter of the wet bar in the basement rumpus room.

  Beyond the basement laundry room, nondescript if it weren’t so dilapidated, behind an ancient door glazed with fissured white paint, is the rumpus room. It appears that late in Richard Nixon’s first term, Howard Hall’s previous owners turned their attention to the basement. They obviously had grand plans, wanted to be known as the kind of people who knew how to have and share a good time. The narrow, rectangular hinged basement windows are painted black. The stone foundation walls and brick retaining wall are paneled over with oak-stained fir paneling. The plumbing and heating systems for the house are hidden above a dropped ceiling of one-foot-square cellulose tiles into which recessed lighting is installed. To improve the ambience, eight impossibly ornate, floral, bronze double sconces are attached to the paneling and hooded with lampshades that were, once upon a time, spray-painted gold. Black-leatherette-upholstered banquettes are built against the walls. Because of all the built-in seating in the room, Lisa and I presume that deuces and four-top café tables must also have been part of the decor.

  But the beating heart of the adult rumpus room is the wet bar. It stands, crouches really, in the corner closest to the room’s only doorway. It is equipped with two Formica bar tops and its own independently switched, recessed lighting. After we scrub the place for a few hours and install a combination of low-wattage red lightbulbs in the fixtures, the room has the same appeal that the best Eastern European dive bars on Manhattan’s Lower East Side had during the early 1980s.

  To complete the effect, for Valentine’s Day the first year in our new home, Lisa has a mirror for the bar back etched:

  MANNYLAND est. 2003

  Sinister in so many intriguing ways, this rumpus room could be the very place Calvin Klein first imagined when he dispatched one of his art directors to concoct a vaguely seedy, possibly sexually apocalyptic, retro-suburban, subterranean lair to set the advertising launch for his denim line. How disappointed he must have been when his man presented him with the comparatively tame set for that controversial 1970s teenage house party. And how relieved he must have been that his vision was not fulfilled when the public scandal broke. Rather than having a gold-hued orange shag carpet, our floor has marbleized black asbestos tile. After being washed with boric acid and treated to a polish specifically designed to return dazzle to such tile, this floor achieves a look that, if it had been used for the denim line, would not have resulted in a simple scolding and censure by the iconic fashion designer’s culturally right-leaning critics. Our basement rumpus room, Mannyland, would have resulted in his exile.

  The bar is stocked, the wood paneling washed. All that we need to throw our first basement house party is a few café tables and some bentwood chairs. We also need to install a brass pole. I had this clever idea about providing live entertainment in our den of iniquity. Lisa loved the idea.

  But my attention wanders. Our daughter, Heath Ryan, is about to celebrate her second birthday. She needs a special present. I decide that no daughter of mine is going to enter her third year of life without a flock of one dozen songbirds in a cage large enough for her to walk around inside. A birdcage as big as the one of my imagining has to be fabricated in a shop. So, before Mannyland is ever inaugurated, it is retasked as a woodshop, a function it has served ever since.

  Before we continue, careful reader, a set piece—a harbinger of things to come on The Farm. I marched into the store specializing in songbirds and other exotics on Thirty-s
econd Street just west of Park Avenue South. No point buying Heath one bird or even a pair of birds. She was going to be two in the morning, and a two-year-old deserves a flock, I reasoned. When the saleswoman intuited the depth of my mania, she was more than happy to oblige. She nodded while I described the cage I had yet to build or even buy the material for. “When is your daughter’s birthday?” she inquired pleasantly, and flinched visibly when I replied, just as cheerfully, “Tomorrow.” Reassuring her soberly, I explained that I had been planning the birdcage for a week already, just needed to hurry home and get to the Do-It-Yourself-Big-Box-Store for the necessary aviary building materials.

  We packed the small cardboard box with a pair of society finches, a dazzling gouldian, a chipper spice finch, a brilliant zebra with an orange beak. Truthfully, by the time the saleswoman asked if I might want an electric-yellow canary, I had lost count of the birds, and nodded, dazed, gripping a five-pound bag of flaxseed.

  On the subway, the thin cardboard box containing $1,100 worth of songbirds vibrated on my lap. At home, after stowing the box safely out of the way, in a closet, I announced that I had bought Heath some songbirds for her birthday. Lisa said that she thought that was lovely and asked how many. “Enough,” I replied. “I need to run out to the building-supply store and buy some stuff to make a cage.”

  “I’m wrapping her present now,” Lisa called after me as I closed the door and sprinted to the truck. By eleven o’clock I had barricaded myself in the playroom in the tower on top of Howard Hall. The aviary was built there because the ceiling is eleven feet high. I placed the foundation of the cage right in the middle of the room and began stapling half-inch plastic fencing to eight-foot-long strips of one-inch-by-two-inch poplar. Three hours later I tiptoed into our bedroom and woke Lisa. She grunted fearfully, jumping at my touch. “I need your help attaching the top of the cage,” I explained in a whisper.

  “Now?” she asked, crushed by the disturbance. “What time is it?”

  “I’m almost finished,” I said quietly, as though the whine of the power drill going all night had not been enough to wake both kids.

  “What time is it?”

  “I just need another pair of hands. Just for the last steps.”

  Lisa stood blinking in the harsh light of the bare clip lights I’d ringed my work area with. She stared mutely at the cage, standing, its flimsy lumber torqued—twisted really—from the base. The cage stood nine feet tall. Three of the four sides were plastic mesh. The back, made of thin plywood, already had a perching branch bolted to it. “How many birds did you buy?” she asked, looking at the scraps of construction material and power tools strewn across the playroom floor.

  “I wanted to make sure they had enough room and Heath could stand in there with them. See the door, here?” I said, gesturing. “During the party all the kids can take turns visiting with the birds inside the cage, through the door right here. See?”

  “How many parakeets did you get?”

  “Finches,” I corrected. “They’re songbirds—and one canary.”

  “How many? Where are they?”

  “Ten. Ten, I think. They’re in the closet, there.”

  “Ten?”

  “Ten finches and one canary.”

  “Eleven birds?”

  The final stage, attaching the roof, took longer than planned. The fragile poplar did not hold the weight of the plywood cap, so I had to design a mesh top and further secure the base of the cage. Lisa returned to bed after I barked at her for not knowing which clamp I was asking for.

  I introduced the addled songbirds to their vast new home a few minutes before five.

  Heath never did bond with the birds; the few times I coerced her into the cage, she looked around, laughed, and slipped back through the door as quickly as possible. I was disappointed, but once they started killing one another, I stopped encouraging Heath to play and bond with her birds.

  The first bird to die was the zebra, easily the most expensive. I found the male society in a heap at the bottom of the cage a few days later. The female looked a bit hammered-on too, so I put her in protective custody in a small, portable cage attached to the outside of the mother ship. When she recovered, I reintroduced her to the flock, but by then another finch had been killed and it felt like releasing her into the general population was tantamount to feeding her to the sharks. The children were banned from the playroom, and before long I dreaded checking on the songbirds. Soon the cage began to stink.

  All the while I suspected the canary. Twice as big as the finches, he seemed the obvious aggressor. Finally three male birds and the female society were all that remained of Heath’s flock. Not that Heath noticed these murderous goings-on, or the waning population.

  Well into a rum-soaked cocktail hour, Lisa traveling for business and the children long since asleep, I made a cursory check of the gladiator ring—the first in days. There in a corner of the bottom of the cage, the female society lay dead, strangely wet—ignoble. The canary flipped away off the common watering dish, the locus of so many skirmishes. “You killed the little girl!” I barked, tearing open the plastic netting with both hands. “You rotten fucking birds!” I howled, lurching inside the wobbling cage, the birds screeching, panic-stricken.

  The three remaining brutes flew out of the precariously listing aviary and around the room. When I exited the cage in hot pursuit, it collapsed in a heap. One made a beeline for a closed window and died with a sharp pop on impact; the second flew straight out the door of the playroom and into the hall. I nimbly snatched the canary out of the air as it flew in circles, orbiting the overhead light above my head, palmed it delicately, and pitched it underhand into the wall, crushing it. I stomped out of the playroom in search of the last escaped savage raptor; he was nowhere in the hall. Striding into the bathroom, a rum-drunk ogre intent on mayhem, I found the bird dead in the constantly running toilet (have to fix that gasket), spinning slowly in the languid whirl of the current as the water leaked incessantly into the porcelain bowl, wings spread as though it had perished on Golgotha.

  Crime scene mitigation: I gathered the carcasses, disposed of them in the garbage curbside, and dismantled the cage with my hands, vacuuming up whatever minced-corncob bedding the mice had not eaten and I had not managed to get earlier with the dustpan and broom.

  “What happened to the songbirds, hon?” Lisa asked, a week or so after returning from her trip.

  “They died,” I replied.

  “That’s a shame,” she said, truly saddened. “They were a lot of work, though, and they stank.”

  I nodded agreement, flipping a pork chop in the roasting pan.

  * * *

  On The Farm, Mannyland will double as both woodshop and plant nursery. I shall replace the forty-watt bulbs that shine from inside recessed sockets in the ceiling with full-spectrum UV lamps, and on the bar top I shall place the tidy plastic trays of peat-moss pellets, acquired from a Do-It-Yourself-Superstore in the Shadow of the Gowanus Expressway, from which my seeds will sprout.

  Animal protein, the primary challenge as far as the editors at New York magazine are concerned, won’t be a problem. I have plenty of room in my driveway for a ten-foot, bright blue, plastic fish tank. That tank is my tilapia farm, my primary source of protein. For years, I’ve been reading about how tilapia is favored for its resilience by aqua farmers. If tilapia is half as sturdy as fish folk say, I’ll have no trouble raising them. I’ll need to diversify my protein sources, but I’ll address that once the tilapia pond is installed. I set aside exactly two days for fish-tank construction in my build-out schedule. The vegetables, once raised from seeds in the basement, will grow in the backyard until harvesttime.

  Planned a little more than one hundred years ago as a fastidious knitting of the best that urban and rural lives have to offer, our neighborhood remains an arboretum. At the back of the houses, the trees are old and the canopy high and thick. Still, I spend the first few days charting the movement of the sun across the yard,
staking out and precisely marking the sunniest patches, most only a few square feet across. At best the available sunlight is what farming journals and seed packets describe as “partial.”

  The yard is hard-packed clay, and since we moved in four years ago, it has successfully resisted our every effort to domesticate it. Every application of grass seed is repelled. In fact, any seeds we introduce take to the yard as they would a trampoline. Days pass before even the most cursory rain is absorbed (during which time the yard becomes a Baffin Island for mosquitoes). The backyard has yet to provide a single member of the family any prolonged joy or recreation. Forays to the outdoor space at the back of the house are undertaken, like a moon landing, with steely deliberation after exhaustive planning and liberal, some would argue dangerous, application of bug spray. Even the most optimistic visits undertaken in perfect weather typically devolve into a demoralizing retreat to the safety of the screen porch.

  The Farm will offer a first best opportunity to actually use the space behind our home. I don’t realize, of course, that within a month I will be shackled to it, as it transforms from our backyard to The Farm—from yard to patch, my patch—patrolling it at all hours to make sure it has not washed away, is not being invaded by predators, consumed by blight, or destroyed by foul weather.

  Our tumbledown mansion has a front porch with broad square columns, and in the kitchen there’s a 1943 Chambers gas range; morning light streams through stained-glass windows in the living room, and afternoon lights explode through the leaded glass window on the landing between the parlor and second floors. But the Japanese cherry tree in the yard had a special place in our hearts and played a pivotal role in our decision to buy the house. Because the cherry can apparently withstand the lead-poisoned clay that passes for soil, it was the only thing that ever grew back there. Each year since we’d moved in, the bloom had been increasingly feeble. Now, with the exception of one tertiary limb, the entire tree is free of foliage, very sick indeed. So Joe Gallo, the owner of the neighborhood landscape service G&D Landscape, pronounces the tree terminally ill. “Dead” is his term, delivered without inflection. “She is dead,” he repeats, casting his professional, if merciless, gaze upon the neighbors’ trees beyond our stockade fence for good measure.