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

by Manny Howard

  During the summer of 1977, while the Son of Sam besieged the imagination of the city’s sexually active citizenry, Matt and I entertained ourselves for days on end by flushing readily identifiable objects down the toilet, racing down the eight flights from the Proskys’ apartment onto our bicycles and down the hill to a decrepit Fulton Landing. Here we would throw our bikes clattering, wheels wobbling, onto the splintered pier and race to the flimsy metal railing where sewage issued forth, raw, into the East River. We would watch, yodeling with delight, while floating pods of shit, raggedy waving standards of toilet paper, lewdly shimmying condoms, all animated by the current of the gray water over impossibly fouled black rocks, and tampon applicators of every description, bobbed from the outflow pipe below our feet. The stink was intoxicating.

  Not once all summer did we spot one of our test objects—the toy soldiers decorated with party ribbons to differentiate ours from just any old toilet warrior. We never saw the dozens of bulletlike Fisher-Price villagers we commandeered from Matt’s little brother, Ben. We didn’t see the Popsicle sticks painted with brightly colored model-airplane paint. Imagining the sewer as a tree, we would hang our heads over the rail and scrutinize the wonderfully hideous waste spilling from its trunk until concluding that we had simply not covered the distance between Matt’s bathroom, a branch and the mouth of our sewage pipe fast enough. We were just going to have to try harder, pedal faster, and choose a quicker route next time.

  And there would always be a next time.

  TACKLING DAYLIGHT

  After my seedlings wither, I am seized by panic. According to my schedule, I had to have plants in the ground by early April. It is now May. The first of the many rules I have set for myself is broken when, after a considerable search, I find a plant nursery that stocks food beyond tomatoes and herbs. There is no shortage of such plants at most plant nurseries, but ask after corn and you only get a funny look. The average nursery has the occasional eggplant and always plenty of lettuce varieties. There is, of course, no end of tomatoes. But trudge down to the neighborhood nursery in search of rhubarb, celery, carrots, or potatoes, and you’ll be sorely disappointed. That is, unless you live on a desolate strip of Rockaway Boulevard in Ozone Park, Queens, near C. Verdino & Sons plant nursery. Once upon a time, the multi-acre parking lot across the boulevard here was packed with the cars of racing fans and Aqueduct Racetrack bustled. Today, beyond the chain-link fence that stretches for a half mile, the only vehicles in plain sight are warehoused vans and panel trucks from some unidentifiable city agency.

  C. Verdino & Sons is as pregnant with promise as Aqueduct is barren, and once I’m among the plants, my spirits soar. The rows and rows of healthy juvenile food plants call out to me: corn, rhubarb, celery, and carrots. There’s a fig tree and callaloo. I pack my cart with broad beans, cantaloupe, beets, four varieties of eggplant, cucumbers, fennel, cabbage, green Scotch bonnet, and jalapeño peppers. I buy eight collard-green plants. I load the car with plants and belt the fig tree into the passenger seat next to me.

  The soil delivered, plants on the premises, it is time to tackle daylight. The time has finally come to address The Farm’s paucity of sunlight. To conquer my fear I apply the scientific method. The first order of business is to measure it, so I spend the better part of a week chasing the sun around my field. I mark squares using inchwide, orange plastic construction ribbon, hoping to figure how many square feet receive constant sunlight. After twice discarding the painstakingly gathered evidence, I reach the brutally obvious and now unavoidable conclusion that not one square inch in the garden receives constant sunlight. I try for a third time. Same result. I am disappointed, but not discouraged. Good news is mixed in here. The northwest corner, christened the Back Forty because that’s how many square feet it comprises, receives by far the most sun. I know that now. I also know that, on good days, I can expect plants placed in the Back Forty to receive two hours in the morning and at least another three in the afternoon. I am still not clear if, according to the brief text and brightly colored charts on the back of the seed packets, this constitutes partial shade or partial sun, but if worse comes to worst, I can always string up those now-dormant grow lights in the basement.

  One morning while I’m dropping the kids off at my mother’s house, Cathy Fuerst, a dear friend of the family’s, inquires about progress on The Farm. I tell her it’s going well, but confide that I am amazed and a little overwhelmed by the amount of work required just to get it to a place where I can simply use the space to grow plants and raise animals. Cathy, whose mother grew up on a farm in North Dakota, smiles wryly. I am momentarily embarrassed thinking of my eight hundred square feet and imagining the Fuersts’ verdant spread in North Dakota. “I have a proposition for you?” she says. Cathy has an enchanting way of making declarations that sound exactly like questions. This diametric projection is as intriguing as it is confusing; oftentimes the most assertive observations are accompanied by a tentative sweeping away of a phantom lock of hair from her cheek, or a sideways glance—a pantomime of timidity. Her son, Caleb, whom I have known since, as they say, before he was born, eighteen years ago, recently graduated from high school. Cathy explains that she and Craig, her husband, have been desperately trying to get Caleb off his ass. When she told him about my project, he showed the first glimmer of interest since they’ve been agitating for him to do something, anything at all. Caleb, Cathy says, even asked if I might need help on The Farm. I can feed him but I can’t pay him, I interrupt. He’s happy to volunteer his services, she assures me.

  Apparently Caleb has specific requirements for any project—job or otherwise—during this, the summer before he ships off to college. Whatever it is, it must allow him to set his own schedule, and the work can never conflict with his evening bartending classes up at Columbia University. Unpaid labor on The Farm, no matter how filthy, is better than a paying job with a static schedule that he has to dress up for. This volunteerism satisfies both his preconditions and his parents’ requirement that he do something useful.

  The next day, just before noon, Caleb hops off his mountain bike and reports for duty. We work like dogs, Caleb and I, to get all the plants in the ground in my backyard. We exert extra effort on the potatoes, since they are my hedge against starvation, as they have been for civilizations across the centuries, a hard-to-fuck-up crop that survives when nothing else will.

  The plan is to plant the potatoes in their own long, rectangular box, what is called a drill. Because potatoes are the one necessary plant the Verdino nursery didn’t have, I order them online. What arrives in the triple-ply paper sacks are spuds just about as big as golf balls that are already starting to send out shoots, exactly like all the potatoes I’ve left sitting around the kitchen for two weeks too long—I make a mental note.

  Only one thing is stopping us from building our potato drill. The tidy rows of tender plants are a delight, but even after positioning the young plants imprudently close to one another and after only half a day of work, we have run out of space in the garden. Caleb and I stand, each with a small plastic-potted plant in hand, surveying the garden, swivel-heading as if we might miss a vacant patch of earth if we don’t stay vigilant. I curse. Caleb nods in agreement. I repeat the curse. “You have any special attachment to those bushes?” asks Caleb.

  I thought I was going to be thrilled simply to have the extra pair of hands and the company of a man whose biggest mistakes are still ahead of him. Turns out, it’s the fresh eyes that are paying off first.

  Lisa and I are finally of one mind about something behind the house: the fate of the low-slung shrubbery that rings the back porch. It has to go. It doesn’t matter one bit that we came to this conclusion from diametrically distinct perspectives. Lisa wants them gone because they obscure what, in her imagination, will be, as soon as I have completed this most recent harebrained scheme, a delightful view of the backyard and the newly installed cedar fence beyond. I need them gone because there is no room for the luxury of ornam
ent on The Farm. We are both so pleased to agree on anything that we don’t bother to explore each other’s motives.

  Caleb and I conspire to tear the bushes from their beds with my 1989 Toyota Land Cruiser. We set to loosening the root-ball around each bush with shovels. We attach one end of a bright yellow vinyl towrope to the root base of the first shrub and the other end to the tow hook on the front bumper of the Land Cruiser. We have dubbed the Land Cruiser—like most everything else I imbue with any real value, a coveted collectible in a specific rarefied gearhead subculture—The Tractor. Fully expecting each plant, no higher than my thigh, to pop from the earth at the first suggestion of the Land Cruiser’s power in reverse, I throw Caleb the keys, giving him the honor of piloting The Tractor. We both vibrate with anticipation at the prospect of destruction dealt by automotive might.

  Caleb drops The Tractor in reverse and steps on the accelerator, too hard for my liking considering how close the vehicle’s back end is to the Feders’ kitchen window and the back corner of their house. The rope goes taut and the bush shakes, but holds firm. Caleb steps impatiently on the accelerator, and The Tractor’s back wheels spin, tracing out a parabola in black rubber on the cement driveway. There is a momentary waft of vaporized rubber. Plan A needs an immediate adjustment. “You’re gonna need to put her in four, bud!” I yell over the roaring engine.

  Caleb cannot hear me. The engine continues to roar and the towrope, tight as a guitar string, hums. Its roots having absorbed the initial shock from the tractor, the bush no longer even shudders. Caleb looks nervously from the bush, to the back of the Feders’ house, to me, more concerned about whether I will continue to let him drive The Tractor than whether he is about to remodel the Feders’ kitchen, or tear the front bumper from my collectible, or snap the towrope and disembowel me. All these grim possibilities, it strikes me later that evening while watching the grimy ring forming in the tub I am soaking in, were in the forefront of my mind, but they had probably still not occurred to Caleb.

  Caleb’s nervous, giddy glance falls on me, and I drag my index finger across my neck. “Cut it,” I command inaudibly. Caleb sets the engine to idle in park, hops out of the cab, and just about skips the distance of the taut towrope to where I’m standing among the pugnacious shrubbery.

  “Cut the engine when you leave the car, bud,” I suggest. Chastened—more so than I had intended—Caleb returns to the cab and kills the ignition. He saunters back to where I am standing, staring at the now impossibly tight knot around the scarred red trunk of the ornamental bush. We struggle to untie the knot in the rope and reset it even closer to the earth. “We’re gonna need a bigger boat,” he says, grinning, pushing the bramble of hair from in front of his face over the top of his head.

  Caleb is wearing baggy, knee-length, nylon, Carolina Tar Heels basketball shorts, a pair of high tops that he has clearly given up on, and a T-shirt. The printed name on his shirt does not cross the generational divide. I don’t know if it’s a band or a sardonic salute, and trying to parse it makes me feel my age. When he shows up for the second day of work wearing the exact same clothes he had soaked through twice the day before, I offer him a pair of my Carhartt welder’s pants and an old denim work shirt. Work clothes should provide more protection than what he’s sporting, I insist, handing him a pair of leather work gloves I’d bought for him while on a beer run the night before. “I’m good,” he says, rejecting the clothes but appreciatively accepting the gloves. “There’s nails and all kinds of crap to get hung up on out here,” I warn.

  “I’ll be careful,” he promises, as if I were his grandmother telling him to wear a bicycle helmet to bed.

  Over the months, Caleb continues to wear the same gear to work every day. I suppose he washes the stuff. It stops mattering as the various rank odors on The Farm overpower any smell that Caleb’s good, honest hard work might produce. I never stop wishing that he’d dress the part—the way I do, especially when we leave The Farm on an errand. But I am no longer a reliable judge on matters beyond the driveway, so I cannot say who looks more out of place when we venture into what comes to be called The World.

  “We are going to have to shorten the towrope. Let’s double it up,” I say. “Also, The Tractor’s going to have to be in low four-wheel drive. It’s fishtailing all over the driveway.” Caleb nods knowingly, in a way that assures me he has absolutely no idea what I have just told him to do. “You want I should still drive?” he asks, unself-consciously mugging teamster dialect and hoping the question sounds ten times more casual than it is. “So you can supervise, I mean.”

  “You can drive. Yes. But you need to use a lot less gas. Build power slowly, don’t let the back end move. It doesn’t matter if nothing looks like it’s happening. This is just like pulling a tooth, right? Nothing is gonna happen till it’s out and on the tray. Big roots. Same theory?”

  “Nasty,” he says, smiling. “Gotcha.”

  “Also, we’re going to lock the hubs and put it in four-wheel drive.”

  “Cool.”

  “Cool?”

  “Yup.”

  “You’re a dope,” I say.

  Caleb smirks. We double up the towrope. I dig out the root-ball to about ten inches. The main stem is completely exposed. The general rule is that trees look the same below the soil line as they do above it—that the root structure mimics the branches. I assume that this is true for ornamental hedges, but suddenly recall that these shrubs have been pruned regularly for something like thirty years. All the same, the Toyota is a lot of tool to be using in such an enclosed space. Having Caleb at the wheel makes the entire project twice as dicey as it might otherwise be, but I’m going to tell him to clean out the entire rabbit hutch and the barn after lunch, so I figure I must let him have some fun. For an instant, standing, staring, first at Caleb’s eager grin from behind the wheel and then at the visible top of the root-ball, I’m tempted to dig each of them out one by one, but the sense memory of excavating the spider hole still dominates my upper body, and just the idea makes my ears disappear beneath my shoulders.

  This time the front bumper is less than four feet from the first bush; still the angle is considerably more horizontal than vertical, which means we’re not pulling the roots up out of the hole, but along the ground against the four or more feet of clay that separates the bush from the bumper. Still, low gear with all four hubs locked and 155 horsepower and maximum net torque (whatever that is) of 220 lb/ft at 3,000 rpm; it’s a decorative bush for Christ sake.

  Caleb fires up The Tractor, guns the engine ferociously in neutral. I shoot him the stone face in response. He grins widely and reflexively brushes the hair from his face with the back of his hand. I can see the reflection of the brake lights when they engage and those of the reverse lights as he shifts into reverse. I wait; watch the rope and the bush, looking for the first signs of movement. Caleb shuts the engine down, leans his head out the driver-side window. “You don’t suppose the roots are attached to the house, do you?” he says mischievously. “You know? Grown in around the foundation? Lisa would shit if you pulled the back of the house down.”

  “She would shit,” I agree, knowing how many more horrors would then follow. “Get down from there. Let’s have at these plants with a pick for a while.”

  “I was kidding,” protests Caleb, disappointed and confused.

  “It was funny. Really, it was, now get the pickaxes, wouldya.” We spend the balance of the day digging the row of shrubbery out of the ground by hand. Caleb forlornly looks at The Tractor, wondering if now wouldn’t be a good time to try using the truck’s 220 lb/ft of net torque again. At the end of the day, though, we have enough room for the all-important potato crop.

  My father grew up in the north of England during World War Two and nurses a nostalgia for the privations he endured then. He identifies himself as a war baby, has fond memories of his family’s victory garden. On June 22, he informs me that once the seed potatoes have been planted, I must continually build up the potato
drill to increase my yield. To create such a heap and not bury the cucumber vines, squash, and collard greens so closely butted up against the row of potatoes, I will need to build a retaining wall. So, delighted to have any direction at all, I construct a ten-inch-high plywood box some eighteen feet long and three feet wide filled with an additional half ton of topsoil. The beans are finally in the ground. The cantaloupe vines are reaching out across the front lawn. I drench the vegetation daily in a solution designed to repel the neighborhood dogs. I am not concerned what effect the active ingredient, methyl nonyl ketone, might have on the produce. My farm is not organic, but the callaloo is thriving.

  Before The Farm begins its inexorable slide into depravity and chaos, my father often stops by on his way home from work for a glass of wine and a quick inspection of his potatoes. He follows their progress and is excited by what he sees. Now that Jane has left for the summer, excitement, enthusiasm even, is rare around The Farm. He is animated when he predicts how many hundreds of potatoes are busy bulking up under the soil. With each visit his estimate inflates. “There couldn’t be fewer than two hundred spuds down there, E,” he remarks, eyeballing the near waist-high, deep green plants. Everyone in the family calls me E—short for Emanuel, a name stripped from me by my sixth-grade English teacher, who told me my given name was too long. “No, you are Manny,” she pronounced. And she was right.

  Ω = (N1 + N2)!/(N1! N2!)

  It is mid-May. I am behind schedule. However, completion of the hutch has brightened my mood. I relegate the personal disappointments from the failures at tilapia farming (or even tilapia acquiring) to the slag heap of history. The promise of rabbit husbandry has buoyed my spirits. The future is bright.

  When the day comes to install the rabbits in their new home, I layer a bed of straw in each cage and fill the two metal bowls, one for water, the other for the feed, in each cage. The rabbits take to the hutch with what I understand to be a rabbit’s typically understated delight. They appear somewhat startled when I turn on the HVAC system.