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

by Manny Howard

  I have a grim sense of closure, no question, but this, the final battle of my war against The Farm’s entropic collapse, has robbed me of even the most incremental sense of accomplishment during these last six months. Here I am. It is September. I ate the rabbit. As I stand in my kitchen still gripping the empty bowl of rabbit stew, my entire farming experience has distilled into one dreadful, close-to-inedible entrée.

  Doe #4 escapes, leaving the three surviving kits sired by the Chinchilla to fend for themselves. They do well and grow quickly, though a plan for a fryer-weight harvest is the furthest thing from my mind. All the same, by October, as the kits reach that all-important five-pound mark, all three vanish overnight. I never suspect Lisa.

  Though the contractually mandated self-sustaining period is over, I continue to eat out of The Farm, eventually combining the vegetables still coming out of the garden with food from the outside world.

  The sand-colored buck (now called Sandy by the family) goes missing from The Farm in late October. He’s run away before, but unlike the other rabbits over the wire, Sandy has always come back. This is the longest he’s ever been gone, and I have quietly given up on him, discontinued my dusk and dawn perimeter searches. One evening in early November, as I leave the house to take Fergus out for a walk, Sandy reappears on the lawn. I don’t know how you miss a twenty-plus-pound, light brown rabbit sitting in the middle of your front lawn, but I do it.

  Fergus does not.

  He is off the porch and after Sandy. Trained to hunt birds as a puppy, Fergus is a much more enthusiastic squirrel dog. He enjoys little more than treeing a few squirrels during the course of a walk. The dog runs down Sandy effortlessly, shakes him vigorously once, breaking his neck, killing him instantly.

  My heart does not break. I simply pick him up, tuck him under my arm, and sneak around the back of the house with Fergus, who is curious when Sandy will wake up, in tow, through the Feders’ yard and into the barn. I heft Sandy into a trash bag and sprinkle a cup of lime over him, not because it’s all that warm out anymore, but because when things die around here, that’s what I do. I put the bag in the trash for pickup. I never tell Lisa. She asks occasionally what I think happened to him. I reply that I do not know.

  As each day passes and I crawl closer to the goal, I can feel the outside world tearing at the fences. For seven months my life has not only changed shape, but function, too. It is no longer taken up in the struggle to expand and fill every possible space I imagine for it (this way to Afghanistan, that way to the Mojave Desert, this way to Ukraine). My life has become a response to The Farm, not just the potential in it, but, much more important, the limits imposed by it. While there is peace in our house again, and The Farm is rarely spoken of, I am seized anew with panic about what the false promise of limitless choice will bring.

  I arrange for Carlos to lay more sod on two-thirds of the plot. I can’t watch as the grass is laid in prefabricated strips across my earth. In truth the lawn may as well have been asphalt, but my time has passed. Anyhow, I forget my selfish orthodoxy after just once wrestling with the kids in our newly verdant backyard. I still maintain the flock of layers and now Bevan Jake harvests the eggs every morning. Lisa has taken on the responsibility of the little Chinchilla, the last rabbit standing. The sneaky little sire of two of the three litters has the entire back porch to himself now. After one weekend when he was back East, visiting from Berkeley with his family, my brother, Justin, egged on by his wife and Lisa, insisted that I help him dismantle and cart away the long-abandoned FEMA Trailer.

  The chaos of this past year still reverberates through Howard Hall, though. The discord, almost audible, chasing the children as they charge down the stairs and out into the garden, still lurks. But we are mending. “We are mending.” I mutter this confirmation standing in the basement laundry room, folding towels and a raft of the kids’ clothes.

  We can commit ourselves fully to anything—a discipline, a life’s work, a child, a family, a community, a faith, a friend—only with a poverty of knowledge, an ignorance of result, self-subordination, and a final forsaking of other possibilities. If we must make these so final commitments without sufficient information, then what can inform our decisions? This is the first time Berry has ever been inside the house. I smile, finally knowing, I think, where he’s going with this one.

  In spite of the obvious dangers of the word, we must say first that love can inform them. This, of course, though probably necessary, is not safe. What parent, faced with a child who is in love and going to get married, has not been filled with mistrust and fear—and justly so. We were lovers before we were parents, know what a fraudulent justifier love can be. We know that people stay married for different reasons than those for which they get married and that the later reasons will have to be discovered. Which, of course, is not to say that the later reasons may not confirm the earlier ones; it is to say only that earlier ones must wait for confirmation.

  THE WINTER PALACE

  The leaves are drying on the trees and the days are shorter now. The few plants still in the field sag, wilt, and harden in a tangled mat on the soil. The only chickens left are the nine layers, so I reorient the chicken-wire line to run east-west across the garden. I pull the coop out of the corner of the yard into the center of a four-foot-wide fenced strip. This will be the hens’ winter palace. I staple some foam insulation to the plywood and cover most of the wired openings with clear, corrugated plastic. I stand back wondering whether the hens will survive the winter. The only quality I admire in a chicken is its apparent stoicism. They are rumored to be able to live in temperatures as cold as fifteen degrees, but not much beyond that. I make a note to purchase a heat bulb and to run an extension cord to the coop. It will take me most of the winter to accomplish this one last errand.

  In November, Tex calls from Montana. He is excited, says he just found out what happened to my potatoes. “We were listening to the ag report on the radio. Some listener calls in, says her potato crop failed. She said the only spuds she could find weren’t as big as a dime.”

  “Yeah, shirt buttons.”

  “Right. Tiny. Anyway, the ag report guy says this happens occasionally, especially if you are ordering your seed potatoes online … like who does that, Howard?”

  “Yes. And?”

  “The ag report guy goes on, says fancy people like you who order online do occasionally get bad spuds. The plants look great, but there’s no crop.”

  “So it wasn’t my fault?”

  “No, it probably was, but you can use this as an excuse if any of those sophisticated city folk you pal around with when you’re not out here ask, ‘Why no potatoes?’”

  “My dad’s going to be very excited to be off the hook. He hasn’t really recovered yet.” I make the call. Dad’s thrilled. I have my doubts; root fungus is still my number one suspect.

  As far as I can tell the tender, young fig tree is stone dead. The tornado dropped a limb from that Norway maple there. Each of the four secondary branches on that limb was four times the size of the fig. Why it still persists at all is something of a mystery. As I have done so many times before here on The Farm, I get out a garbage bag. This time, rather than putting the tree in it, I wrap it around the nub of the young tree. I wrap the short trunk, more slender than Heath’s wrist, and I bind the two together with duct tape. This will insulate the fig through the winter. If it has anything left, we will know next spring.

  A few evenings later my dad shows up with his rototiller. It’s one of those as-seen-on-TV products, and my old man swears by it. After an excruciatingly detailed lecture on the theory behind, proper maintenance of, and standard operating procedures for the two-stroke internal combustion engine, he asks if there is any wine in the house.

  There is.

  In the dimming light, after my dad has headed home, I tear up the larger of the remaining expired woody crops. The smaller stuff I intend to plow into the soil. I struggle starting the two-stroke; try to remember what Dad
was saying about the priming bubble, warning me against doing something. What, though?

  I have to take the bottle of beer out of my back pocket and really lean in and yank the ignition cord, but after I deliver a few frame-rattling tugs, the engine turns over, and what I believe to be my final act on The Farm begins.

  As the rototiller churns over the topsoil, its obvious fecundity is exhilarating. This patch is alive. That’s clear because I can see, touch, smell its promise. I wonder what that tastes like? Nothing special. Maybe my young fig tree isn’t so fucked, after all. The chickens are still jerking worms out of the soil after it rains. This gully has been transformed. It is alive. So focused on my project, so shattered by it, still the real transformation wasn’t mine. All the effort I put into preparing the ground for the crops and the livestock, all the thought about and concern for the soil, all was forgotten in the grinding work of watering what was thirsty, feeding what was hungry, and, well, killing what was not dead. In a conversation, you always expect a reply, says Berry.

  I turn off the rototiller so I can hear Berry more clearly, and am momentarily seized by the fear that the tool won’t start again. “Wendell,” I say by way of greeting.

  And if you honor the other party, you understand that you must not expect always to receive a reply that you foresee or a reply that you would like. A conversation is immitigably two-sided and always to some degree mysterious; it requires faith.

  The rototiller does start up again, eventually. Berry is right, of course. All summer I worked without once stopping long enough to even listen for a reply, never mind bother to understand one. I open another beer and clean the blades of the rototiller, careful to collect the soil as it falls from the steel blades as I wipe them down. “Here,” I say, tossing this small handful of eastern Long Island’s best soil that I’d picked free from the tiller’s axle back into The Farm.

  My faith collapses in crisis sooner than I’d like to admit. Standing in the new snow, I begin to trim more foam insulation board to fit the outside of the high-rise coop. The nine remaining tenants are The Stray from Agway, and eight layers—four brown pullets, and four white leghorns. It’s not fifteen degrees yet, but it’s not much warmer.

  I have finally purchased an infrared heat lamp—like the ones you see at a banquet-hall carving station hanging over the prime rib. I am cutting the insulation to keep the bulb’s heat inside the coop: The Winter Palace. As I begin to screw the panels onto the coop, I am overwhelmed by a wave of doubt. Why do I want to keep these chickens through the winter? Why insulate the obviously dead fig tree in a black trash bag? What good can come of this? The experiment is long over, The Farm, for the most part, plowed under. Do you recall, I suggested that the good worker will not suppose that good work can be made properly answerable to haste, urgency, or even emergency? Berry asks rhetorically. I give a nod of recognition. The other thing that the good worker knows is that after it is done, work requires yet more time to prove its worth. The good worker must stay to experience and study and understand the consequences—must understand them by living with them, and then correct them, if necessary, by longer living and more work. It won’t do to correct mistakes made at one place by moving to another place.

  The fig tree blooms in the spring. Not from its shattered trunk; rather, its new limbs grow right from the ground. Two shoots that, through the summer, grow horizontally across the garden, spreading out as wide as they like, just as Bevan Jake does after he sneaks into our bed each evening as we sleep. Predictably, the broad leaves on the delicate boughs shade a good portion of what Lisa and I describe as a non-marriage-challenging vegetable garden that shares the plot with a well-kept backyard.

  It was a rough winter for the chickens. It never got so cold that The Winter Palace could not protect them, but it was cold enough to bring the predators around. I lost all four leghorns and two of the red-buff pullets. The three remaining layers, including, against all the odds, The Stray, provide us with an egg each a day. It’s been over a year since we have purchased eggs, and we often have a surplus, so we unload them as house presents when we’re invited over to dinner.

  EPILOGUE

  My enormous failures were so much less devastating than the constant minor mistakes I made, errors born of ignorance, laziness, sloppiness, cussedness, or combinations of any two or more failings. All that stood between complete collapse and modest success was my unwillingness to stop work, an unself-conscious need to, without shame, fix all I had broken, heal what I had injured, clean all I had fouled. Professor Berry writes an eloquent critique of America’s work ethic. Work is not an ethic, he insists, work is a necessity. The American fetishization of work as an ideal removes it from practical reality every time it is described as aspirational. I never felt so strongly about work before, never mind a job; never thought of work as necessary.

  On The Farm I first met my authentic self. It was not entirely flattering really—driven, uncompromising, solitary, selfish even. Still it was an enormous relief to finally find me, to put aside my fears that I might pass away and never recognize the real me in the crowd of costumed approximations. This introduction was the heart of the answer to the question that is still asked years later: “Why did you keep going?”

  On The Farm, Wendell Berry girded me. Not that I had ever read a word he’d written until I was back at my desk, trying to make sense of the year while the dwindling flock made do on the frozen dirt of their run. The only thing that really mattered to me was the work. Locavore theory meant nothing. Neither did the obvious virtues of urban agriculture. I had no opinion about the strictures and ordinances banning beekeeping in the five boroughs. Organic? What about it? I had no attachment to any principle other than that of the work, and the only dedication I felt was to getting it done.

  All I know is that experience is not about analysis and understanding; experiencing anything requires that you suffer it, requires that you rejoice in it as it is. As word spread about The Farm, well-meaning folks began to introduce me around as the Urban Farmer. Simply by doing, I became, in the eye of the casual observer, an expert. Still, even my audience’s enthusiasm for my experience fails to make me the expert they require, fails to imbue the expertise they lust after. Once again a phony. If the equally well-meaning people I was introduced to were familiar with my story, my “farm adventure,” they almost always inquired whether I was still, even now, “living off the farm.” They wanted me to say yes, hoped that I had (for all of our sakes, really) persisted, extended the journey, made it mythic. Some were disappointed when I answered no, not exactly, but few were surprised, nor entirely sorry, it seemed, when I prevaricated.

  I was asked to lend my name to a community garden. I was approached by producers of various reality-television shows, asked to continue my project for their benefit (and my infamy). I only self-immolate, I assured them. Their counteroffer was to give me a job as a producer, supervising the action of other hapless urban agricultural crash dummies.

  Not for me.

  The trouble was that once found on The Farm, then returned to the real world, my authenticity wilted, the joy of the discovery fading away a little every day. With every introduction I endured as the Urban Farmer or That Guy Who—Did You Read the Story About … ? But I quickly began to fear being discovered once again. I still don’t know if I believe urban agricultural sustainability is the right course, not in any productive way, and not at half the price I paid (both life and treasure). My interest in “greening” the urban landscape was still minimal. Community gardens still smacked of the grimmest joinerism. Especially embarrassing were the introductions made to dedicated, hardworking activists such as Ian Marvy, executive director of Added Value, a nonprofit that introduces low/no-income Brooklyn kids to the wonders of gardening—to producing food.

  Then, yesterday, attending a backyard barbecue, standing on the back porch of Caleb’s mom, Cathy Fuerst, I proudly announced that Flock #2 had arrived. Caleb laughed, the playful, mock scorn you’d hope to elici
t from a young man who has just completed two years of college (has it really been two years since he left The Farm for college?). From other friends, those with a less intimate knowledge of life on The Farm but much closer to me in age than Caleb, the horror is equally theatrical, and entirely genuine. The simultaneous question “Why on earth would you start all that again?” is asked by the chorus, crushingly serious.

  “God only knows,” I replied, rolling my eyes, mugging for the crowd. But, in truth, I know just as well as He.

  The uncomplicated (if entirely insufficient for the uninitiated) answer is as rudimentary as because we have not purchased eggs in two years.

  And how, in fairness, could anyone be expected to understand who had not answered the doorbell at noon one beautiful day in May, after the rains had finally lifted, and greeted the deliveryman from the United States Postal Service, a red-and-white, two-by-three-by-four-foot cardboard box, marked live birds, at his feet. You asking, “Is this your first box of live chickens?”