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

by Manny Howard

  “I’m moving mountains, Manny.”

  “If you say so.”

  I’m only aggravated by the principle of the delay, the effect that it has on the schedule I am keeping in my head. I don’t know anything about plants, nothing useful at least. I don’t really care all that much about them, certainly not in the abstract. I’m pretty certain that I have added little to my knowledge about plants since my first biology class in junior high school, and knowing that makes me a little twitchy about the next step. My friend Tex, a beloved mentor who lives outside Bozeman, Montana, and the one person responsible for inspiring in me an appreciation of the real rural world outside the Five Boroughs, has bored me near to tears on numerous occasions, railing against the dangers of “alien invasive species” of wildflowers to his beloved high Western desert.

  I know that photosynthesis has two stages: the first exchanges carbon dioxide for oxygen, and the second, the Calvin cycle, generates the energy for plant growth by producing glucose. I know that xylem and phloem operate as the plant’s circulatory system and skeleton, and that water and nutrients flow up from the roots, and that water and sugar (the result of the Calvin cycle) flow down from the leaves.

  It would not take all that much reminding to get me conversant on the topic of osmosis. That’s about it for book learning, though.

  In my heart I know that most plants need more sun than my garden gets to generate enough energy to produce edible fruit, stems, or roots. I am nothing if not adaptable, however, and I am convinced that by force of will and continuous hard work I will make the plants in this tiny field produce food for me.

  There’s no point starting a vegetable garden in New York City that is designed to feed me without starting all the plants from seeds. I return to the Do-It-Yourself-Superstore in the Shadow of the Gowanus Expressway and buy still more ready-made disks of peat moss, load them with seeds of every description—cantaloupes, acorn squash, Green Zebra tomatoes—and place them on the dusty wet bar in my ramshackle basement.

  Finally, a constructive use for the still-to-be-completed rumpus room once known as Mannyland. Dormant for months, this space is all but ready to function as a plant nursery. I replace all the red lightbulbs with full-spectrum UV bulbs and set up a battery of clip lights with the same bulbs: endless ersatz sunlight from every angle. In only days I have evidence of growth. I am just as thunderstruck as my son, Bevan Jake, had been when he was two years old and, at playschool, his dry, red kidney bean had exploded from the dirt in a Dixie cup into a tender two-leaf shoot. This early success encourages me to redouble my efforts. I insert multiple seeds in single peat disks and plug in still more artificial sunlight.

  As though racing one another from the bar top to touch the sunlight plugged into the ceiling, my seedlings soar, nimble—okay, wiry—ever upward. This, my cousin Gabe informs me when I invite him to witness my success, is exactly what they are doing. “Your lights are a little high, Cuz,” he says clinically, if a little apologetically, as though delivering the news of a terminal diagnosis. “These seedlings are a little too spidery to survive outdoors.”

  “Balls,” I reply. “They’ll do fine. They’re standing stock straight down here, aren’t they?”

  “There’s no wind down here, is there?”

  Within a few days, still in the basement and without the presence of any wind at all, the seedlings begin to collapse under the weight of their own ambition. I try to transition them to the outdoors by moving them to the sunporch, but the collapse is pandemic, and within a day hundreds of seedlings lie dead and dying across the vast expanse of water-swollen peat pellets. I am not an organic greenmarket farmer dedicated to sustainable practices. I am a Mesolith, not yet a subsistence agrarian. Both in style and substance, for all my grand schemes, my mighty works wrought, I have made surprisingly insignificant gains on a hunter-gatherer.

  Successful gardeners call the process hardening off. After the seedlings have grown strong and gained a leafy appendage or two in a controlled indoor environment—and mine never did because, for starters, I failed to cull the weakest plants, which stole vital nutrients from their stronger siblings, thus compromising the entire crop—the successful gardener chooses an overcast day after the weather has grown mild to introduce his young plants to God’s creation. In this painstaking, maddeningly gradual process, the plants first spend a few hours in partial shade. Time outdoors for the young sprouts is gradually increased until seedlings spend a half day, then a full twenty-four hours outside. Only then, careful to protect them from wind, does the successful gardener usher them into direct sunlight. This process is also episodic: a few hours become a few days, and finally the plants are transplanted to their place in the world.

  THE CONTROL OF NATURE

  I pull into a parking space around the corner from a hydroponics superstore in Queens. Staring out the windshield, momentarily mesmerized by the eight lanes of careening traffic on the Long Island Expressway just twenty yards away, I half recall a conversation with my cousin Gabe, who insisted that all serious hydroponics stores in the city are under continual surveillance by the police and/or agents of the Drug Enforcement Agency.

  Emerging from the truck onto the treeless, sun-bleached block of Flushing, I am dressed in a yellow floral-print shirt of Italian origin, white jeans, and flip-flops. If for no other reason than I am dressed like an extra from Miami Vice (the movie), I momentarily inhabit Gabe’s fantasy, scanning the street for indiscreet unmarked vans and open windows on the second stories of the brick-faced row houses that face the hydroponics store across the yawning trench of the expressway. In this drama I suppose that I am the rogue vegetable farmer, grown weary of toiling over cabbages and green beans, ready to take on Johnny Law and try my hand at a real cash crop. It did occur to me as I began my work on The Farm that any small family farmer in America who does not allocate some of his land or energy to growing high-quality marijuana is either a dullard or a coward, plain and simple.

  The hydroponic supermarket is a squat, one-story stucco structure, a muttered obscenity of a building with nine-foot-square windows on which the weekly, monthly, and daily specials are written in soap.

  Once I’m inside, the distraction of my ganja-grower fantasy is swept away by the striking potential of applying some scientific method to The Farm, which is expanding before me. If only I knew the first thing about the science of hydroponics. I am transfixed by the enormous variety of gear in the showroom. Rows of plastic containers—jugs and pots and barrels of every description, spools of clear and opaque tubing in countless diameters, waiting to be applied to the project of plant growth without soil or sunlight. Stocked on beige painted aluminum shelves and stacked on the mottled white linoleum floor are pumps and filters calibrated for every need. Reflective plastic foil hangs in rolls from brackets near the ceiling, undulating like Christmas tinsel in the breeze from the industrial air conditioner. I walk the aisles gawking at the hardware, confounded that a gear freak such as myself has only just now encountered this pastime. Imagine applying such equipment-intensive science to vegetables? Forget survival, I will win prizes for growing zucchini as big as forearms. I will need construction cranes to remove pumpkins. Consumed by the effects that these tools will have on my vegetables, it never occurs to me that based on the price tags alone, this specialized precision equipment is not designed for growing mere vegetables.

  How many times have I told Heath and Bevan Jake? There’s a tool for every job, I say in sober tones. It’s important to use the right one every time, even if it’s not the one nearest. Even as I look around the showroom, a broad smile splitting my face in two, between visions of beets the size of softballs and cantaloupes like beach balls, I catch the eye of the taller of two salesmen—clean-cut guys in their early twenties. I arrange my visage, attempting to communicate the boy-could-I-use-some-help-buying-a-whole-lot-of-shit-that-I-know-nothing-about message. Eliciting no reaction whatsoever from the tall salesman, I abandon all subtlety and opt, instead, for the
direct approach. “Excuse me?” I bellow cheerfully to another clerk two aisles away. He looks at his watch, then arranges his face in a heavens-is-that-the-time? expression, spins on the heel of one of his skateboard sneakers, and heads for the stockroom like the White Rabbit down the hole. I approach a third clerk, ask for assistance, and I am instructed in a mildly irritated tone to wait a minute.

  “Hey, friend,” I spit, “I’m trying to spend a little money in here.”

  The young man dedicates way too much time working his triceps. His head swiveling on the first vertebra, he turns to face me. He works to make the muscles of his arm twitch. “I wanna grow vegetables in my basement,” I bark at this, the third clerk, who seems more eager to fight than sell. He stops. Takes a deep breath.

  “What kind?” he asks petulantly.

  “I don’t know. What grows fast?”

  “All kinds of things,” he replies, not the least bit curious or engaged.

  “I’m working on a project,” I begin to explain slowly, clocking the first salesclerk circling us, apparently trying to listen in on the conversation. “I don’t know anything about hydroponics, but I am trying to grow enough food to sustain myself for a month, and I only have eight hundred square feet of outdoor space to work with. I need to grow plants in my basement. My cousin shops here. He says he put a garden in his closet. He purchased it here.”

  “In your basement? What kind of plants?”

  “I don’t really care.”

  “You don’t care?” the clerk asks, incredulous.

  “No,” I press on. “What I need is a flexible system. See, if the first crop dies, I need a system that can grow more than one variety of plant, of vegetable,” I add for clarity.

  Suddenly it strikes me: why stop at vegetables? “Hey, can I grow fruit using this equipment?”

  “Some people grow strawberries,” he says, looking around the showroom.

  “That’d be a good start,” I say, rubbing my hands together enthusiastically. “What do I need for them?”

  “Look, I don’t really know how to help you,” says Triceps. “Maybe Chris can help you? Chris!” Triceps shakes his companion, the first guy to ditch me, out of his eavesdropping rapture. Triceps strides away from me without gesturing in my direction. “Can you help this gentleman?” he asks rhetorically, making his way quickly toward the front of the store to begin organizing what looks like a collection of bathroom wall vents.

  “Chris,” I exclaim, trying to sound cheerful. “Help me, would you? My name is Manny. I want to buy an entire growing system: soup to nuts.”

  “What do you plan on growing?” Chris asks, deadpan.

  “Fruit, like strawberries, and vegetables.”

  “There are lots of vegetables,” Chris says, sounding suddenly bored.

  “Okay, Chris,” I say, flashing on the only vegetable my kids will consistently eat. “I want to grow broccoli. Broccoli. Yes. I want to grow that.”

  “Broccoli’s complicated. You’re going to have to watch the temperature with broccoli, cauliflower, too. It is tricky keeping the temperature below sixty degrees, trickier than it sounds, but it’s vital or you will stunt the plant.” He regards me, clearly profiling me, trying to make sense of the white jeans, the flip-flops, and especially the floral-print, yellow dress shirt. After a considerable pause he speaks again. “Hey, you know who’s smart about low-temp growing? David,” Chris answers his own question. “David! This guy wants to grow broccoli,” he calls to the White Rabbit just reentering the sales floor from the stockroom.

  “It doesn’t have to be broccoli,” I try to correct. “I don’t really care … just easy,” I sputter.

  “Help him, would you?” says Chris, walking away toward what appears to be bottles of shampoo—actually humic acid. Pulling a cloth from his pants pocket, he begins to dust and rearrange the opaque brown bottles with their colorful labels. Chris is still looking over his shoulder at me while his associate begins the conversation anew. “You want to grow broccoli?” asks David amiably.

  “Not necessarily. I am working on a project. I need a hydroponic system that is flexible. I am not sure what plants I want to grow yet.”

  “Plants? What kind of …”

  “Vegetables,” I correct myself.

  “What kind?”

  “I don’t really care,” I sigh.

  “You don’t care, huh?” asks David, looking around the showroom.

  “I just want to grow what’s easiest.”

  “None of this is easy,” David says steadily, looking over my shoulder to Chris, trying to disguise his expression, one both angry and confused.

  “I’m sure,” I say, growing weary of being addressed as a child. “How about this?” I ask, grabbing at a reflective zipper bag that looks as if it should line the inside of a good-size closet in a prewar apartment. “If I get this, what can I grow and what else will I need to get started? Let’s put a list together.”

  “You are going to grow broccoli in a closet?”

  “No. I’m going to use my basement. It’s about four hundred square feet of usable space.”

  “Then you won’t need that,” David says, walking toward a display of paddling-pool-size, black plastic tubs. “What you might want is a reservoir. You’re going to need, like, thirty square feet.”

  “No problem,” I say, feeling the first signs of traction in this frustrating retail experience. “A reservoir and what else?”

  “We can start you out with this five-gallon reservoir,” says David, holding up a black plastic container about the size and dimensions of a busing tray from a Greek diner. “You’ll also need tubing, nutrients, grow nets, some grow medium. Do you have a pH kit?”

  “I don’t have anything, David. How many plants will that hold?” I gesture forlornly at the entirely inadequate plastic reservoir that he is filling with gear.

  “Six, about six,” he says without looking up, reaching for a package of six blondish, oversize steel-wool-looking pads.

  “No good, David. I need to grow closer to sixty plants.”

  “Sixty? Sir, you gotta walk before you can fly,” he says, then that pause, and that scrutinizing once-over. I flex my toes in my flip-flops while enduring his examination and wish that I had not. “Sixty of what kind of plants?”

  “Vegetables.”

  “What kind of vegetables?”

  “I don’t care, remember? Whatever works.”

  “You better talk to Paul,” says David, suddenly very clipped, looking around the room nervously. “He’s the manager.”

  “I don’t want to talk to anybody else, David. I want you to sell me a rig so I can grow good stuff to eat in my basement. I have a huge basement and I have got to grow enough food to live off of for a month. Will you sell me enough gear to do that, or not?”

  “Talk to Paul,” David says, pointing to a man with a tight-clipped beard wearing a retro Houston Colt .45s baseball cap.

  David begins to unpack the plastic tray and calls, almost yelling, “Talk to this guy, wouldya? He wants to grow sixty plants in his basement.”

  “Vegetables,” I clarify, though more out of habit than anything else.

  I walk the length of the store toward Paul before he lifts his eyes from a wholesale catalog he’s marking for order. When I arrive at the counter, I stand in silence waiting for him to put his pencil down and close the catalog. “You want to grow sixty plants in your basement?”

  “That’s right.”

  “You don’t care what kind of plants?”

  “Vegetables. I would like to grow vegetables.”

  “Broccoli?”

  “Sure. If that’s easiest.”

  “You’re unfamiliar with the hydroponic growth system?”

  “Entirely.”

  “Hydroponics is a way of growing plants using mineral-nutrient solutions instead of soil. Even plants that usually grow on dry land—in soil—can be grown with their roots in a mineral-nutrient solution or in an inert medium, such as perli
te, gravel, or something called mineral wool—fibers made from minerals or metal oxides. It’s the same stuff that gets used to make drywall; it’s in gaskets and brake pads.

  “In the 1800s plant researchers discovered that the soil itself is not essential to plant growth, that plants absorb essential mineral nutrients when they’re dissolved in water. So, when vital mineral nutrients are introduced into a plant’s water supply artificially, soil isn’t necessary for the plant to thrive. You getting this?” asks Paul, who has delivered the lecture from memory while his eyes wandered around the store, probably taking inventory or wondering why his girlfriend hasn’t returned his phone message in two days, but only fixing my gaze when he addresses me.

  “Sure. Yes. Sure,” I say, wondering how old Paul is and where the hell he gets off.

  “Good. There are two kinds of hydroponics: solution culture and medium culture. Solution does not use any solid medium for the roots, just the nutrient solution. There are two types of solution culture: static solution culture and continuous-flow solution culture. The second kind, the medium-culture method, uses a solid medium for the roots like sand, gravel, or, say, rock wool. That’s the most common kind of mineral wool. There are two main variations for each medium, subirrigation and top irrigation—watered from the top or the bottom. You clear?”

  “Yep. It’ll grow vegetables?”

  “I recommend you start with lettuce.”

  “No broccoli?”

  “Broccoli requires low temperatures to thrive. That’s an added layer of complexity you don’t need.”

  “The kids like broccoli. They have not figured out lettuce, yet.”

  “Really? The kids like broccoli. That’s pretty uncommon,” says Paul, totally disinterested.

  “Fine. Lettuce, then,” I say sullenly, looking around the salesroom to avoid eye contact, and trying to figure out what everybody else has been looking around the salesroom at, when I notice a dozen, maybe more, of those opaque, domed, 360-degree surveillance cameras. This is a big showroom, but that seems like an awful lot of surveillance.