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

by Manny Howard

  The postman replying, without missing a beat, “First today,” grinning, and handing me an ocher certified-delivery receipt to sign, Tom Jones’s cover of “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again” drifting from his truck. “I gotta ask?” the postman, just sayin’.

  “Sure. I raise ’em out back.” I gesture over my shoulder with my head. “For eggs.” As if maybe I need to reassure him. The postman looking just as suspicious as impressed. “I got plenty. You want? Take some home. They’re great. Totally different than from the store.”

  Him saying, changing the subject, and nodding, polite, acknowledgment that he’s doing so, “I’ve delivered pretty much everything. You name it, insects even—live ones! But never live birds … chickens. This is a first.”

  “Just glad to help.” Me smiling, handing back the signed receipt.

  Him waving—“Good luck!”—over his shoulder as he returns to the truck.

  I’ll never fall in love again.

  “Haven’t bought an egg in two years.” The claim authenticates my secessionist insurgency, a largely ceremonial war against slavish consumerism. Is it really too much to describe the laying hens as the foot soldiers in this battle against the gully? Because if not them, who?

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book grew out of a feature I wrote for New York magazine and published in the fall of 2007. Without the faith and patience of the editors there, this very unusual story would never have made it into print. Thanks to Adam Moss, Hugo Lindgren (who, in his inimitable way, was once heard to say, “Manny, the hard part is over. Anybody could write this story now, nobody could have done what you just did. So, shut up and write.” So, as usual, üg, thank you and f*ck you), John Homans, Ann Clarke, and Jody Quon. Special thanks to Faye Penn, who assigned the original piece, and kept the lines of communication open to The Farm through the dark days.

  I am fortunate to have Scribner as a publisher. Thanks to Susan, Nan, Anna, Dan, Steve, Isabel, Meredith, Brian, and, especially, my editor, Brant Rumble, for his confidence, insight, and wisdom. At the Gernert Company, thanks to David, Sarah, Stephanie, Allison, Courtney, Will, Erika, and, above all, Chris Parris-Lamb for his endless encouragement, straight talk, sound judgment, his regular indulgences, and his mad skills as a reader.

  All I know about Roy Jones Jr. I learned reading Gary Smith in Sports Illustrated. Thanks, Gary. The same can be said of Gail Damerow when it comes to raising chickens. Marc Linder and Lawrence S. Zacharias added clarity and context to my understanding of the agricultural history of King’s County. Ray Damiani showed me how to handle rabbits and I will never be the same.

  I am profoundly grateful to Wendell Berry and his canon, without which I may never have understood why The Farm cast the spell that it did.

  Thank you, Caleb Townsend.

  Thanks to Al and Jane Feder (especially you, Jane), the McCorkel clan, and a raft of similarly deeply patient and generous neighbors. Thanks to Angello, Joe, and Carlos from G&D Landscape. Ta to my big cousin, Gabriel Evans, for a smattering of technical advice and his unrelenting enthusiasm and damn-the-torpedoes encouragement. Nice save, Dr. Danny Fong.

  I am blessed to have such smart, supportive, patient friends; I relied on all of their gifts while I wrote, and even more so when I did not. Tina Fallon, Cathy Fuerst, Suzanne Sullivan, Michael Wylde, and Eric Slater received daily updates about The Farm both when I was working there and when I was writing about it. It must have been excruciating. Daphne Klein and Trilby Cohen read an early draft and, somehow, found encouraging words that propelled me forward. Thanks to CPL, Eric, Nancy Messereau, Sarah Burnes, and Sam Sifton, who read the last working draft, for their focus and insight and the brave face. Dan Bibb, Evan Brenner, Catherine Brophy, Jim Cooper, Craig Townsend, Andrew Eccles, Page Edmunds, Samantha Gillison, Joanna Hershon, Bill Hogeland, Emily Jenkins, Peter Lodola, Josh and Diana Lomask, Jonathan Mahler, Danielle Mattoon, John Merz, Eric Simonoff, Robert Sullivan (who led me here, wherever this is), Mark Tarbell, Chris Boyer, Brendan Coburn, Ward Welch, Paul Rice, the brothers at Holy Cross Monastery, and Norman Vanamee were all there when I needed them.

  Because of the boundless love, sacrifice, and quiet confidence of my parents, Jos, Gabrielle, and Marty, and my sister, Bevin, I did not plummet. Thank you.

  To my wife, Lisa Ryan Howard, whose pride in me I can only hope to one day earn, whose faith in me makes it possible to greet the day, whose sacrifice while The Farm was operational was enormous and aspects of which remain beyond measure, who did not sweep our children, Heath and Bevan Jake, up in her powerful arms and leave when she had every right to, I thank you.

  Before anything would grow in our backyard, it was necessary to install plumbing. Following instructions provided by a local cement contractor, I dug a dry well through clay until I reached sand. The hole, no wider than a trash can, ended up being nearly eight feet deep. (Photo by Eric Slater)

  During his entire life, I trained Fergus not to dig holes. (Photo by Eric Slater)

  The dry well would not work without being fed run-off by a series of French drains. Used by landscapers to eradicate wet spots in sloping lawns, these plastic-and-gravel-lined trenches were dug on a grade leading to the dry well. The dry well was filled with rocks and gravel and capped with a garbage can lid.

  After the plumbing was installed, five tons of topsoil was imported from eastern Long Island.

  During the preparation process I had casually observed how the sun fell on the plot. After the topsoil was delivered I charted where direct sun fell and for how long. The Back Forty (far corner), just forty square feet, was the only area that received more than five hours a day.

  Plants in the Back Forty grew quickly; the other three-quarters of what came to be called the Fields of the Lord lagged behind.

  I purchased kid-size shovels for Heath and Bevan Jake, hoping to engage them in the The Farm at its earliest stages. The three of us dug almost two feet before Mom appeared bearing juice boxes, rescuing them from sun too hot to work under.

  Like all the structures on The Farm, the rabbit hutch was built on the driveway, without written plans. (Photo by Gabriel Evans)

  To preserve as much of the limited space on The Farm as possible, and like the chicken coop that would follow, the two-story rabbit hutch was built to take advantage of vertical space. Design alterations included four-inch casters so that it could be moved around The Farm and eventually wheeled into a Dumpster on the curb. (Photo by Gabriel Evans)

  One of the earliest and hardest lessons learned on The Farm: Doe #2 lies dead on the kitchen floor, a victim of the dreaded infestation known as fly-strike.

  The Stray, acquired while buying twenty-five day-old meat birds at the Agway in Englishtown, New Jersey. One morning this very ugly and presumably useless hen laid an egg, instantly changing my sustainability strategy. (Photo by Daniel Reese Bibb)

  Fix what’s broken; feed what’s hungry. (Photo by Daniel Reese Bibb)

  The Flemish giants refused to breed according to my schedule. In a panic, I turned to chickens for meat and, eventually, eggs. Caleb and Bevan Jake introducing one of two bantams to The Farm from the back of The Tractor, a 1989 Toyota Land Cruiser. (Photo by Eric Slater)

  This salt-and-pepper team of bantams were the first of many roosters among the twenty-five meat birds to find their voice. It is legal to own hens within New York City. Possession of live roosters is illegal. On The Farm, crowing, no matter your weight, resulted in confinement to the soup pot. (Photo by Daniel Reese Bibb)

  “On The Farm,” Heath Ryan informed her doctor, “we don’t name our animals.” Simultaneously, she provided her father’s proudest moment and her mother’s worst fears realized. (Photo by Eric Slater)

  Overrun by dozens of day-old poultry, Bevan Jake maims one of the ducklings underfoot. Clearly fearing the worst, the little boy looks to his father before whirling around to see what he has stepped on. In that instant, Caleb scoops the dying bird up and behind his back. (Photo by Eric Slater)

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sp; My wife, Lisa, agreed to the retasking of our backyard without much consideration. The Farm was barely up and running before she regretted that decision. After a grueling day in the corridors of publishing power, she wanted her home to be a retreat. The Farm, with its attendant filth, disorder, and tragedy, made that impossible. A master of cognitive reappraisal, her solution: stay away. As the months wore on, Mr. Hemmings, her driver, started picking her up earlier and dropping her off later. By July we were barely speaking.

  This five-pound Cornish Cross meat bird registered only 1.5 pounds on the antique produce scale I relied on. This snafu pushed back the start date for my dietary moonwalk almost two weeks.

  The bird’s throat is cut, taking special care not to sever the spinal column and thus stop the heart. It is important to let the bird do most of the work evacuating blood from its body.

  After the aesthetically superior antique failed me, a much more reliable twelve-dollar plastic diet scale was added to the tools in the abattoir.

  After spending some minutes in a 112°F bath called the scalder, a chicken can be picked (no self-respecting farmer plucks anything) pretty easily. In fact, removing the majority of a bird’s plumage is akin to peeling a sock off a warm foot.

  When the going was good: growing in The Fields of the Lord when The Farm was at its peak were tomatoes, eggplant (various), collard greens, callaloo, cabbage, corn, beets, pumpkins, peppers, yellow squash, leek, fennel, figs, cantaloupe, and beans.

  On August 13, the first tornado to strike Brooklyn in more than one hundred years traveled nine miles from Staten Island, across the strait at the mouth of New York Harbor spanned by the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, up a glacial moraine, and struck The Farm before dying in a subway trench five hundred yards to the east. It was hard not to take it personally.

  The tornado ravaged the world beyond The Farm. There were no human fatalities (or injuries) but scores of trees, including century-old ones like this, were felled, causing all manner of property damage.

  After months of working closely and happily with my father on the crop that has sustained civilizations for millennia, come harvest, this is all I found in the painstakingly constructed potato drill (a quarter is used for scale here).

  Preparing the First Supper in the blistering heat of Indian summer. Salt, pepper, and coffee beans were the only allowances from the world outside The Farm. (Photo by Daniel Reese Bibb)

  Chicken feet were a central ingredient for the rich, delicious stock that most of the vegetable preparation relied on. Keeping them in a ziplock bag in the freezer was the least best storage strategy as far as Lisa was concerned. (Photo by Daniel Reese Bibb)

  The First Supper. (Photo by Daniel Reese Bibb)

  Initially intended as my sole source of cooking fat, the ducks became our charismatic megafauna and were spared after my daughter, Heath Ryan, negotiated for their lives. “Kill all the chickens you want, Daddy,” said the then-four-year-old, “but save the ducks.” My wife, Lisa, often lamented that The Farm would turn the children into ax murderers. I believe the experience provided an increasingly important understanding of where food comes from. The verdict is still out. (Photo by Daniel Reese Bibb)

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  1 ] Gary Smith, “One Tough Bird,” Sports Illustrated, June 26, 1995.