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

by Manny Howard

  The United States has seen more than one thousand tornadoes a year since 1990, when NOAA began keeping records. Tornadoes strike America more often than any other country in the world. Still, until August 8, 2007, when our tornado crossed the Narrows, a twister had not struck Brooklyn in 108 years. Our tornado lays waste to my lonely little farm just one week before the planned start date of my reliance on it as my only source of food. But the horrible twister is just one more horrible thing that has happened since early last spring when I first put shovel to earth.

  It won’t be the last.

  As bad as it is on The Farm, our tornado has done much more damage on the street in front of Howard Hall. Before I conduct a closer assessment of the damage to The Farm, Lisa, the kids (still clad in pajamas), and I take care of the neighbors. Five trees have come down on our block alone. (Later, police officer Malloy from the Seven-Oh says Westminster Road fared pretty well compared to the four surrounding blocks, especially Rugby Road, where the funnel cloud seems to have traveled down the middle of the street, uprooting or tearing apart every tree. Strangely, the side-view mirrors on the cars parked on the west side of the street are flattened against the cars, while on the east side they are popped out and away from the chassis.) Our block may have been spared the full brutality of the storm; still, five cars are total write-offs, one ornate front porch is crushed, and the top of the street is blocked by a felled one-hundred-year-old elm. Across the way, a birch has been blown down onto Walter and Kate’s front porch. Like some Mesolithic spear, a branch from that birch as thick as my forearm juts from the passenger door of Walter’s shiny, new black Volkswagen Golf. We both stand by for a moment completely still, then, shaking himself from his actuarial trance, Walter asks earnestly, “My God, Manny? How is your farm?”

  “Shit, who cares? Don’t worry about that now, Walter. What’re you gonna do about your car?”

  “Yeah, how’re the chickens?” calls Peter from where his brother John’s car is parked, the hood stoved in by a smaller tree.

  “They’re in Al and Jane’s hemlock.” I shrug.

  We set about cutting and moving all the branches we can into one pile on the west side of the street. After three hours, the neighborly work done, I grimace. It’s time to return to the ruin of The Farm. An agrarian Alice, I pick my way gingerly through a portal in the tangle of hemlock branches that now bisect The Farm. Yesterday, the Fields of the Lord; today, some of the chickens are picking their way about among the mangled crops. The tomato forest, once a barely manageable tumble, is a heap. The collards are blasted as though by a spectral tantrum. One variety of eggplant escapes unscathed—a four-inch tree limb rests just above the plants. Amidst the wreckage, I now understand: the results of the terrifyingly alien, excruciatingly intense, occasionally terribly hard work of the spring and summer, by its relentlessness alone, affirmed me as no other task has.

  • Tomatoes—planted in what turned out to be the most productive corner of my forty-by-twenty-foot lot. A twelve-foot-long tree limb has damaged every plant.

  • Eggplant (various)—pathetically spindly after a life spent seeking more than partial sunlight; the rain has toppled half.

  • Collard greens—vigorous and greedy for sunlight. Two-thirds of the plants have been uprooted by the branches and foliage of the fallen tree limb.

  • Callaloo (Caribbean varietal spinach)—one-half of the plants flattened by the tree limb, but not snapped; might be salvageable if staked before the sun gets too hot.

  • Cabbage—gangly and bug-eaten, these heads are as hard to imagine eating as they were before the storm, but undamaged by it.

  • Corn—windblown and beaten by rain, every plant is standing at a forty-five-degree angle.

  • Beets—the tuber never grew bigger than a large marble, and now I’ll be lucky if the leaves live long enough to eat any of the plant at all.

  • Pumpkin—drowned.

  • Peppers (various)—like all the other plants in the front yard, entirely unaffected.

  • Squash (various)—drowned.

  • Leek—windswept, but fine.

  • Fennel—discovered undamaged under hemlock trunk.

  • Fig—torn in half by tree limb. Two figs already ripe in the dirt (I brush both off on my pants and eat them immediately).

  • Herbs (various)—starved for sun by tomato plants. Hopeless.

  • Cantaloupe—still visibly crawling across the lawn in the front yard, still no sign of fruit anywhere on the vine.

  • Beans (various)—drowned.

  As I survey the damage, it seems improbable that there is enough food here to sustain me. But, as has happened over and over through the spring and into this unseasonably wet summer, after every setback my spirits rebound. The motivating mantra was always, Well, now the worst has finally happened.

  Now it finally had.

  The tornado wiped out the corn, the squash, the pumpkin, half the eggplant, most of the beans, and the fig tree. Of course, some failures weren’t the tornado’s fault. The cantaloupe never developed the slightest hint of fruit. The cabbage always looked dreadful—sinister, spindly foliage from an episode of the original Star Trek. The storm left the tall, dark green potato plants leaning, like the corn, at forty-five degrees, but they are already starting to right themselves in the bright sunshine. I am afraid to take a census of the potato drill, but continue to hope that beneath these robust stalks waits my caloric safety net.

  As of today I know what I will be eating: a dinner of chicken, tomatoes (some fresh, some stewed today and stored), and various hearty greens, such as collards and callaloo, and a breakfast, God willing, of a single egg, maybe two.

  The potato drill—sixteen by three by one feet of rich black earth—is unaffected by the tornado and, in all likelihood, is brimming with at least two hundred potatoes. This is my anchor crop. As long as potatoes are in my drill, I will be fine. And how hard could it be to grow a potato?

  The wind has died down and the temperature and the humidity are now spiking. The chickens scattered in the fallen hemlock still need to be rounded up, fed, and watered.

  So, just as I have done for 172 days, I work. The chickens are not at all motivated to quit the hemlock for the present, so the first project is to saw the maple branch into pieces small enough to lift off the crops and carry out of the field. At its widest, the branch is as thick as my thigh and extremely heavy. There will be lots of little pieces of wood. After that I’ll need to try to stake the plants to give their trunks a chance to heal.

  I lean into the day, and as I do, Wendell Berry speaks. When one buys the farm and moves there to live, something different begins. His voice is carried, as usual, on the lightest breeze. An extended pause—just wind in the branches above—then, again, that voice: One’s thoughts begin to be translated into acts. Truth begins to intrude with its matter-of-fact. One’s work may be defined in part by one’s visions, but it is defined in part too by problems, which the work leads to and reveals. And daily life, work, and problems gradually alter the visions. It invariably turns out, I think, that one’s first vision of one’s place was to some extent an imposition on it. But if one’s sight is clear and if one stays on and works well, one’s love gradually responds to the place as it really is, and one’s visions gradually imagine possibilities of the highest order thus come within reach: what one wants can become the same as what one has, and one’s knowledge can cause respect for what one knows.

  I stand up from the shovel I am working and look to the sky, now a brilliant cloudless blue, while I am listening to Berry. I can see Lisa watching me from the window of her second-story dressing room.

  A few hours later, Lisa is standing alone at the top of the driveway, watching the kids play in the tumbledown trees on the empty street, when a police officer arrives. As Lisa backs down the driveway ahead of him, slowing his progress in the vain hope that I will be able to hide all the contraband livestock in the extra seconds she is providing, the officer explains tha
t he wants to make sure we are okay, says he is going house to house through the neighborhood, trying to assess damage to prioritize the work of the city’s emergency-response teams.

  Lisa has a morbid fear of the police. So, whenever we are out and about and I am behind the wheel, she announces the presence of every patrol car she sees as though the police, guns drawn, intend to pull us over on sight and remove us from our car.

  This is an interesting reaction from a white woman raised in an upper-middle-class home in Jackson, Mississippi. Most of the time I respond to these panicked announcements by telling her that patrol is a police officer’s job. Only by patrolling can the police perform their duty to protect and serve the community. Protect and serve, I often repeat for emphasis.

  So when the police officer enters our driveway, at the end of which is my unambiguously illegal agricultural experiment, I know that, had she been born with even the most modest flight instinct, Lisa would have vaulted the Feders’ fence and run until she could not take another step. Lisa holds her ground, but she can only be half-listening to the officer because through the thicket of the Feders’ fallen hemlock where I am standing, the din of nervous chickens and aroused young ducks is nearly deafening. The officer must hear this chorus, too. I suspect he has other things on his mind, though. “We’re fine. Thank you so much for checking, Officer,” she says, her extremely charming, aristocratic Southern drawl lubricating and elongating every syllable.

  “You have a tree down,” the officer replies, half question, half statement of fact.

  “Oh, it’s nothing. There is no serious damage to the property. Nobody is hurt,” she assures the cop, walking past him toward the top of the driveway. “But thank you so much, Officer. We really are the lucky ones. The real damage is there across the street.” She’s trying to interest him in Walter’s travails or Peter’s, or anybody’s. “There’s all kinds of damage: property, cars, sidewalks. I think that porch over there might be just about ready to go. Can you see? Just there.”

  My flexible regard for the absolute rule of law—after all, no one citizen can reasonably be expected to obey all the laws all the time—usually makes it difficult for me to empathize with Lisa’s inability to distinguish between the severity of one crime and that of another. I am probably less supportive than I should be. But I do appreciate that, for Lisa, when a cop shows up on our driveway headed for The Farm, we might just as well be cultivating high-grade hemp and harboring fugitives on the tiny plot behind our house as growing collards and raising ducks.

  When she returns without the cop, she grimaces shyly. Is Lisa mugging for me? Flirting? The smile was one I had not seen for some time. It was hard to know for sure. She is standing still, rubbing her palms on the back pockets of her cutoff jeans. “Do you want to come inside and have a cup of tea, honey?”

  “Sure.”

  It never once occurred to me that Lisa might give my farm and me up to the police. This is an assumption, Lisa tells me, only half-joking, after we have made love for the first time in months, I should not have made so freely.

  Still, something changes between us after the tornado. We aren’t fixed, the two of us, far from it, but we are suddenly no longer living parallel lives. Not for now, at least.

  Not until months later does Lisa recall the moment when she turned around on The Farm and explain why she led the cop back up the driveway. “It wasn’t until I watched while you walked into your ruined garden, until I saw you standing in the middle of the wreckage and then you just start working, pulling the place together, saving what you could, just tossing aside all those destroyed plants that you had worked so hard to grow, that I really understood what all this means to you.

  “It wasn’t something immediate,” she cautions. “I stood there at the window watching and thinking, ‘We just got hit by a fucking tornado. What is he doing?’ Anybody else, anybody sane, would give up, would pick up the phone, call the magazine, and explain that it was over. The tornado killed your farm.

  “But that was it. Not you. I’m not saying I understand why, even now. I don’t. But I did understand then, I think, maybe for the first time, how much The Farm means to you. And I am very proud of you.”

  YARD BIRD

  Mind like water, I am clearing the bean rows when a Rhode Island Red, finally a juvenile in full plumage, catches my attention. He stands at the water trough, head cocked, looking at me. The hot afternoon sun baking the pebbles at his feet, he is motionless, momentarily unaware of the other young roosters skirmishing around him. As I regard him, observing the farmer, it occurs to me that he could not possibly weigh a full pound. How is he ever going to grow to the required five pounds by harvesttime? “Eat,” I implore him. “Eat.” He twitches, blinks, and joins his comrades in the constant free-for-all that is life in the chicken run.

  All that fussing burns calories, and those are my calories they are burning in an endless effort to locate themselves one bird higher in the pecking order. I buy more cracked corn, a diet of which, I’m told, puts the weight on a chicken double-quick. I consider ordering more layer cages in order to immobilize the entire flock—a multiplier effect for an all-corn diet.

  Yesterday morning, the second day of being awakened at five thirty by the crowing-but-not-growing roosters, I placed the ringleaders, that impulse-purchase pair of bantams, in blackout conditions inside a cardboard box down in the basement. Then I single out for execution the three joiners, roosters exhibiting a sudden enthusiasm for crowing. The offenders are a pair of the blue Plymouth Rocks and a Rhode Island Red. This seemingly drastic measure has a context. Yesterday morning I discovered that applying a high-pressure hose to the offending birds individually does not keep the predawn racket down; in fact, quite the opposite effect is achieved.

  So, this morning, as I race downstairs to The Farm to quiet the flock, I am torn between a concern that the crowing will disturb the neighbors’ sleep and an abiding desire that somebody, somewhere, will, finally, after all these long months, get fed up with my antics and call Animal Control. My fantasy is that agents of the Humane Society (who for some inexplicable reason all have Geordie accents) surround the house, emergency lights flashing red and blue, sirens blaring. As I exit the back porch, members of an advance team drop me with barbs from the Taser guns they’re firing and leave me hog-tied with plastic restraints, facedown on the driveway. The rest of the rescue team move in and remove the various animals to the safety of their bleak facility on Linden Boulevard. Before the team pull away from the curb, the commanding officer issues me a whopping ticket, just stuffs it in the pocket of my damp, soiled work shirt without uttering a word.

  No such luck. So, now it is five forty-five, the sun is rising, and on the driveway at my bare feet I’ve got three cooling young, underweight roosters cut down before their prime or any real usefulness to me at all. What’s a half-crazy, middle-aged urban farmer to do?

  Make soup.

  But first, a nice hot cup of tea. “Honey, put the kettle on!”

  All my brutal efforts trying to keep the young roosters from disturbing the neighbors are thwarted when the laying hens come online. It turns out that each egg comes with its own song. Rather than using the egg boxes and roosts inside the henhouse, my birds have taken up residence in the now useless kit box built for the rabbits, using it as a communal laying box. It sits under the one scraggly bush Caleb and I spared because we imagined it might serve as a habitat of some sort. Each morning the hens gather around the straw-lined plywood egg box, about twice the size of a shoebox, with a roof over just one-quarter of it and take turns laying. A great warbling din begins as each bird heralds the laying of her egg. If a hen is particularly vocal, she is joined by the chorus, sharing the interrogative alarm because each of its members has either not yet laid the morning’s egg and doesn’t realize she’s up next or has only now forgotten that she just completed laying her own egg. The ancient grocer’s scale hanging from the ceiling in the back of the garage is a beautiful relic, one of t
he few aesthetically pleasing tools on The Farm. It is as stubborn as it is fetching, though. The days pass and my Cornish Crosses (the most dependable meat birds in my flock, and a favorite of the poultry industry) flourish. Confined to cages and consuming as much corn as I feed them, they certainly look like they weigh five pounds. As I peer through the fogged and fissured glass face at the stolid black needle, the news is never good. According to my venerable antique scale, the broilers are not even close to harvest weight.

  One morning in early August, after a frustrating interaction between Cornish and scale, I dig a five-pound dumbbell from the back of the closet in Lisa’s dressing room. I hang it from the wire on the scale. The needle leaps on tight springs across the face of the scale, settling reliably, reporting that just like the Cornish Cross that preceded it, that bright blue, rubber-coated, five-pound dumbbell weighs exactly one and a half pounds.

  The time has come.

  Monday, August 13, the work of the day begins in earnest. I fetch five big, fat Cornish from the prepping pen (water, no food for twenty-four hours prior) and ready them for their reward by hanging them head-down from wires bolted into the ceiling in the garage/barn/abattoir.

  I prep the butchering equipment, heat the water in the scalder to 112 degrees. Ice slush fills the receiving (garbage) can. Hanging the birds upside down lulls them. These birds are the only five that have put on enough pounds to harvest. The rest are still well under the five-pound minimum. I purchase still more cracked corn to try to put the needed weight on the others.