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

by Manny Howard

  “Okay, I’m going to recommend this book,” says Paul, slipping a tabloid-size paperback from the impulse-purchase rack, Hydroponic Lettuce Production by Dr. Lynette Morgan. It has a distinctly self-published appearance. “It’s the lettuce bible.”

  “So what do I need to grow a whole lot of lettuce?”

  “A whole lot of very expensive equipment.”

  “Now we’re talking,” I say.

  “I’m gonna suggest that rig by the window for a start,” says Paul, gesturing over his shoulder at an enormous Amaze-N-Marbles children’s toy made from translucent PVC that appears to be circulating nutrient-laden water to a dozen gorgeous orchids. “It’s vertical, circulates pretty much by itself, and it’ll expand easily, once you get the hang of hydroponic growing.”

  “How many lettuce plants will it grow?” I ask, doubtful about the rig’s ability to satisfy my fantasies of hydroponic domination over hunger.

  “A dozen, eighteen, maybe.”

  “That’s not enough.”

  “Anything more,” says Paul, lifting up his baseball cap, and running his hand through the unlikely buzz cut he is sporting, “it’s going to be a waste of your money.”

  “You’re right, Paul.” I admit defeat. “I better just stick with the lettuce book for now. The rest of this looks a bit too much like science,” I say, trying to add levity to an entirely too serious encounter.

  “It’s all science, friend,” replies Paul humorlessly.

  That cuts it. “Friend”? Sure, so I did tolerate Paul’s self-glorifying ex-Trekkie lecture, but I hate nothing quite so much as a condescending youngster who feels comfortable calling me friend when what he really means is asshole. What is it that Paul thinks he has on me, talking at me like I’m short a chromosome for an unbearable eternity? My heart rate is slowing down. I can feel my hands going cold; this is never a good sign. In my youth it forewarned of a spasm of violence that earned me the wholly appropriate nickname Dumb Bear.

  I need this hydroponics rig, though. Half the day is shot already. If I leave now, it’ll take another day to identify and locate an equally well-equipped outfit, and I needed to have some food growing yesterday.

  Still, “friend.” That is going to be hard to get beyond. Deep breaths, that’s what I counsel the kids: “Three deep breaths is all that stands between you and a day-changing mistake.” I drop my eyes to the counter, an effort to compose myself. There, laminated to the chipped, beige formica counter is an obituary from February 22, 2005: “Hunter S. Thompson, Outlaw Journalist, Is Dead at 67.” Scrawled on the obit’s margin in black Sharpie marker, r.i.p.

  Have the boys here made me for a narc? Me? Maybe. I can’t blame them, dressed, as I am, like a pimp dandy from tropical climes. I may not be a narc or a drug-enforcement agent, but ever since I walked into the store I have been doing what my profession trained me to do, ask as many dumb questions as you can think of. If your ego gets bruised along the way, consider another line of work, and meanwhile, comfort yourself that you do this to further your constant quest for a good story with new information, nuance, or a good quote. But I neglected to identify myself as a reporter—because I am not, I am a farmer—so I have inadvertently communicated only a deep desire to burn vast amounts of money on a project I know nothing about. I have spent the last half hour asking after only the most obvious covert growing rigs—ones designed to fit inside closets. I can be one of only two things, the dumbest cannabis grow king ever to step through this front door, or a cop.

  Looking around at all this incredibly expensive, narrow-use equipment, narc or not, it is possible that I am the first customer who has ever entered this store with a sincere desire to grow vast quantities of fresh vegetables in his basement. “I’ll take the book and think about getting that orchid rig after I have read this,” I say, waving the glorified pamphlet in the air and sliding my credit card toward Paul.

  “Okay,” says Paul, ringing up the sale. “One of the most important things to remember when the plants are young, make sure you have a fan blowing air over them. That makes the plants robust. You don’t get overly tall, weak, spindly seedlings that way.” My heart sinks as I flash on the killing fields of overly tall, weak, spindly seedlings down in Mannyland. A fan. Of course. I walk out of the store removing the skinny, self-published, 102-page text with the washed-out cover art from its paper bag. Back in the car I glance at the receipt: $42.

  THE GOOD WORKER

  I did not know who Wendell Berry was when he took up residence in my imagination. At once professor (though one who claims he’s always been “more comfortable out of school”), eastern-Kentucky tobacco farmer, poet, essayist, novelist, and agrarian activist, Wendell Berry is also, and most poignantly, a champion of what someone who knows him well once called the lost disciplines of domesticity—of husbandry and wifery and making do.

  Berry is a partisan in the politics of domesticity, and this makes him, in his eyes, so far as I can tell, an enemy of both industrial and postindustrial modernity. More on that later. However, this observation of Berry is written in a letter addressed to him by none other than Wallace Stegner:

  You are a hero among those who have been wounded and offended by industrial living and yearn for a simpler and more natural and more feeling relation to the natural world. I should add that you wouldn’t be as good a man as you are if you were not a member of Tanya [Berry’s wife], and she you.

  Berry is a vocal critic of what he calls the glamour of newness, ease, and affluence; and a champion of distraction. No one, Berry chides, with too much to do has enough time. “There are some things the arrogant mind does not see; it is blinded by its vision of what it desires. It does not see what is already there.” In the context of all that is sacred in postindustrial modernity, Professor Wendell Berry is, clearly, a thoroughgoing pain in the ass.

  Here is a prophet of the virtues of moderation, prudence, propriety, and fidelity; the more I learn about Berry, the clearer it becomes that he and I have very little in common. So, when he first started counseling me while I examined the clay that would become my field, I did not recognize the voice. I knew nothing of gullies, nothing of him, never mind the phalanx of disciples and adherents who have rambled after him through time. I did not appreciate how effortlessly he reaches out and back through time to embrace the young Robert Penn Warren, Henry David Thoreau, and, what the hell, Thomas friggin’ Jefferson.

  All, to my mind, great men, and all as far from fellow travelers as I can imagine. Still, if Berry’s first words were not immediately revelatory, ever since I found a moment to look into those gullies Berry was going on about, I have hoped he would return. It turns out nothing pisses a farmer off more than a gully. An extreme form of soil erosion, in its best incarnation a gully is a difficult-to-discern and entirely unproductive seam in a field, one cut by the fierce flow of water and subsequently filled in with useless silt. Gullies only get worse from there, until trees are collapsing into rapidly widening creases, carving away topsoil and creating dry riverbeds, making once productive farmland useless. Named by Scottish farmers after their gully knives, because land blighted by gullies looks as though it has been cut open by a sharp blade. On a farm, gullies usually form as the result of abuse or carelessness at the hands of a farmer (past or present); one who has plowed it without concern for the grade of the field, plants the same crop year in and year out, that sort of thing. Extend the argument, though, as Berry did, and our yard, the yards on the entire block, all of Flatbush, really, was now one big gully.

  It didn’t seem immediately necessary to share these gully musings with Lisa.

  It is early in the morning and the little sun my plot gets has not yet made its way in through the branches of Al and Jane’s hemlock tree, nor over the top of our low-slung bunker of a garage and onto my hard clay parcel. Lisa has already left for her office, has been gone from the house for half an hour already, the hand-waxed black Lincoln Town Car, piloted by Alvin Hemmings, gliding up Franklin Delano Roosevelt
Drive already approaching the Forty-second Street exit. She is no doubt sitting on the black leather of the backseat, legs crossed, four-inch heel distractedly tapping the magazines in the net at the back of the passenger seat. As she does every morning at Alvin’s behest, Lisa will have already looked up from her PDA or a spreadsheet, pausing long enough to enjoy her favorite moment in the commute to watch the sun rising over the East River and behind the Brooklyn Bridge, and then return to busily thumbing her Treo, wordlessly setting the pace of the day for countless people in offices across the country.

  I draw from my coffee cup and survey my farm, feeling the chill of the night before still hanging back here. I am deciding what to fix first. So much is already broken or still unfinished.

  A farmer does not go to work, says Wendell Berry from his place in the pantheon of celebrated American agrarian men of letters.

  I stand stock straight. Did someone say that? Did I think that? Never mind. No, he doesn’t, does he? I agree, but with whom I am not quite sure. In my experience thus far, the farmer never does leave his work, except to sleep, and then, apparently, his work follows him to bed and sits on his chest like an angry ghost.

  One afternoon, a week or so later, I sit, dejected, staring as I rest on an upturned five-gallon, white plastic joint-compound bucket. There’s still so much work to do. I don’t want to do any of it. I don’t know where to start, how to choose some project I might actually complete before the day ends. Isn’t there something, anything, really demonstratively productive to do around here; something I can point to and tell Lisa, “Look at what I did today”? Wonder decays and becomes worry, the heels of my hands, metronomic, rubbing dirt into my cheeks and forehead.

  There are times, says Wendell Berry in an offhand way, when it feels like there are better things for me to be doing. I later learn that Berry holds strong opinions about the role that enthusiasm plays in American life. Berry contends that Americans celebrate enthusiasm, mistaking the fickle impulse for a virtue. The marketplace encourages our consumerist enthusiasms because our wandering retail eye boosts sales. More dangerously, our practiced whimsy, our ability to cast aside the objects of our desire we impulsively collect, extends to metaphysical yearning as well. The whole culture, a country populated by people, like magpies, on the hunt for the next shiny alternative to whatever it is that occupies their sweaty grip at present.

  MEAT RABBIT

  A spasm of subsequent giant Flemish research makes clear that the perfect breed will be the Flemish giant. Adults top out heavier than twenty pounds. Offspring are edible—what’s known as fryer weight, five pounds—in a few months. A doe has between six and ten offspring per litter, but, because she has eight nipples, can only feed that many.

  The nearest rabbit breeder trading in the giant Flemish is in suburban New Jersey. He introduces me to his flock—but not his family—and singles out a pale gray doe, tells me that she comes from a fertile line and will probably do well, but he cannot promise anything. The one buck he has for sale is young but also from productive stock. “He will give you rabbits, this one,” the suburban breeder says, holding him up by the ears. Clocking my alarm, the breeder explains that this is the best, only really, way to hold such giant rabbits. “It no hurts them, the ears,” he assures me.

  I choose the pale gray doe and pay for her and the sand-colored buck with cash. He writes me a receipt on an envelope that once held a bill from the electric company. I have neglected to bring anything to put the rabbits in for the trip back. The suburban breeder roots around until he finds a plastic cat carrier and a cardboard box that held a large rotating house fan.

  Traffic through the Holland Tunnel is near standstill. I can do nothing but keep up with the flow and wait my turn while ten lanes merge into one at the mouth of the tunnel. My only practical knowledge of rabbits came from the pair my sister, Bevin, had as a kid. Bevin loved rabbits, had two plush toys: Rabby was orange and white, and Bunny was white and blue. The real rabbits, Max, a mottled black-and-white, and Charlie, as pure as snow, didn’t turn out to be nearly as cuddly. They lived in a hutch at the bottom of the yard at the house where my mother moved when she and my father split up. Mom was busy making the heap just one hundred yards from the notoriously despoiled Gowanus Canal livable.

  The rabbits were intended to cushion the blow of our family’s upheaval. As their names would suggest, the pair were purchased with the understanding that they were both males. When Charlie gave birth to her first litter, my mother pretty much wrote them off. They kept breeding. Charlie kept destroying the litters. When Bevin and I couldn’t find any evidence of them, my mother was left to explain that Charlie ate them. “Ate them?” we asked, as confused as outraged. It was all very oppressive. Bevin, just eight years old, did what she could, feeding them when she remembered or when she believed doing so would entertain her friends. We didn’t know enough to separate the male from the mother and the newborns, so aside from feeding them, we mostly just left them to their seemingly beastly ways. In short order Max and Charlie went entirely feral. Eventually just feeding them required a team effort. During that winter we would bundle up and trudge through the snow to the cage. I held them at bay wearing a baseball mitt to protect my hand, and Bevin filled their bowls. One day, at the end of the Easter vacation, Max and Charlie and their cage were not in the backyard anymore. I don’t remember if I asked where they had gone.

  Grown-up now, I have every expectation that these rabbits will fare much better than Max and Charlie. I am excited to deliver them to their new home and their, albeit complicated, role in my mission. Not until I return to The Farm do I realize that there is nowhere to house these rabbits, and so I decide to leave them in their boxes in the garage overnight. In the morning it’s obvious that they will need something more substantial. Both rabbits have vacated their boxes and have taken up in opposite corners of the dank cement bunker. Rounding them up—stutter-stepping, feinting, lunging, and bending—takes quite a bit more energy and time than I anticipate. This is primarily because I am afraid, less for them than for myself, how they will react if I grab them. Not until I am more frustrated than afraid do I manage to sweep both up by the ears and return them to their entirely inadequate captivity.

  It takes twice as long as I anticipate to fabricate their temporary cage. Using chicken wire and found scraps of wood, I build a corral into the corner of the back porch. I divide it in two. The sexes are to be kept separate, says the literature, until it is time to breed. They seem happy enough in their temporary home, and I give them all the vegetables in the crisper before running off to the pet store to buy rabbit food. I am proud of my quick adaptive thinking, and I dub the rectangular, jerry-rigged rabbit cage the FEMA Trailer. The name becomes increasingly appropriate as the summer passes.

  Lisa reappears on The Farm but only to check on the rabbits, to feed them carrots and celery from our fridge, and conquer her initial fear of holding them. The more comfortable she gets, the more frequent her visits become. There is not much conversation between the two of us; occasionally Lisa asks me to put one of the rabbits in her lap. She feeds them, cleans their temporary boxes once or twice, and places the timothy grass—which I purchased earlier, mistakenly believing it was for warmth and comfort—as a dietary supplement in their enclosures. While every other project annoys her, these two rabbits provide comfort to Lisa. For the rabbits to successfully fill their function on The Farm, I work hard to regard them with cold calculation.

  Eventually Lisa allows the kids to play with the rabbits, as long as she is watching. No names, though. I’m conflicted. Treating the rabbits as pets tangles my plans. The rabbits are tools. Watching the kids laughing at, playing with, and learning about the gentle giants is delightful; watching Lisa’s growing comfort on The Farm is exciting. But Buck #1 and Doe #1 are working rabbits—meat machines, nothing more. I remind myself of this a few times a day. I understand that a more experienced hand at animal husbandry is capable of accepting breed-stock duality. I imagine
, one day, I will also.

  Really, I’m just happy to have the family out back with me. If that means they play house with a pair of rabbits as big as corgis, that’s okay by me. The permanent rabbit hutch takes three long days to complete.

  THE RAMP

  I am pulled away from farmerhood and back into fatherhood by the surprising diagnosis of a congenital defect in Heath’s right knee. Lisa has been worrying out loud for months about a growing lump underneath Heath’s knee. Until now, I have silently dismissed this concern as Lisa’s way to draw my attention back to the family. Weary of attempting to engage me in conversations about the danger that our daughter might eventually be unable to walk, ever, Lisa finds a highly regarded specialist and makes the appointment. All Lisa requires from me, she says, is that I ferry our daughter to Manhattan and deliver her to Lisa at the doctor’s office for the appointment at eleven in the morning. I don’t even have to stay if I don’t want, but, Lisa says, as though I might have forgotten that her job is intensely demanding, she has to return to the office to attend a series of important afternoon meetings. So, if I do leave, I can’t go back to The Farm unless I want to come all the way back to Manhattan to pick Heath up—on time—when the appointment is over. It’s entirely up to me, Lisa concludes.

  I make the delivery and stay with Heath and her mother. The waiting room is populated by parents—some distraught, some stoic—and their children, each one with a crippling ailment of the bone and joint. Most of the kids are confined to wheelchairs. One child is helmeted and belted in. Our daughter is bouncing around the waiting room, chatting to us and asking why we have to be here. She then attempts a series of vigorous jumping jacks. Lisa, buried in her PDA, does not seem to notice. I take Heath for a walk around the block. When we return, Lisa has become frantic. The wait is longer than she had anticipated. Now she will have to teleconference in to her lunch meeting and reschedule her two-o’clock. Her two-o’clock, she adds, is with an important client. When the doctor’s assistant does call Heath’s name, Lisa remains sitting in the waiting-room chair. She is daviting, thumbing at her Treo frenetically. When she looks up, I wordlessly communicate that she should get her butt out of the chair and come with us. “What?” she barks defensively. I toss my head in the direction of the examining room and proffer a hollow smile and furrow my brow. All this to say, let’s get this day-killing fool’s errand up and over with, please, so that one of these children with serious and challenging, life-altering maladies can get in to see the doctor. “Go ahead without me, I have to finish this e-mail or my deal will explode,” she insists. I say nothing, turn to go. “No. Wait. I’m coming,” she spits.