For a writing assignment, Manny Howard turns his Brooklyn backyard into a small farm with plans to live off the harvest for one month-he recounts his experiences in the book My Empire of Dirt. This path is not a smooth and easy one, though our hero seems to think it will be as he sets out. Along the way Manny Howard comes up with a wide array of odd and often very optimistic ideas about what farming is and how best to raise chickens, rabbits, fish, ducks, and a large number of plants.
Like all new gardeners he discovers that his soil is not good enough for gardening, he doesn’t have enough space for what he wants to grow, his garden doesn’t get enough sunlight, and there just aren’t enough hours in the day to do all that needs to be done. Other than that he has a pretty good time.
Well, accept for the occasional life threatening injury, endless struggles with his wife and children, the odd farm animal attack, and the ever present danger that he will be busted by the cops for his illegal agrarian ways. I’m sure there would have been fish attacks as well, but he never got the fish he wanted. In short, better him than me, is the overall feeling I got from My Empire of Dirt.
Sprinkled among the many horror stories of running a microfarm in Brooklyn are cultural references aimed squarely at middle aged folks such as myself. As well as naming the book after a song by Nine Inch Nails, and later Johnny Cash, he quotes movies and tv shows and books of our generation. When he is trying to pull a stubborn shrub from the ground with his old 4 wheel drive and it doesn’t work he say-We’re gonna need a bigger boat. These little tidbits are fun to run across, and many of the tales of woe and disaster are laugh out loud funny.
Manny Howard has written and/or edited for a lot of big name publications, but the idea of basic research seems to be something he has never run across in his years of being in the publishing trade. He makes every mistake a person can make while laying out a garden, caring for animals, and getting the most out of his limited resources. Only after disaster has struck does he go to Google and seek advice.
A running gag through the book is Manny getting ghostly visits from Wendell Berry, a farmer’s farmer who tells Manny the cold hard facts, usually when these facts are too late to be of any use. There is still the sound of solid wisdom in Wendal’s words though and he adds a touch to class to an often foolish story.
I can relate to many of Manny’s misadventures, as I had my own small farm/large garden at one time, though I wimped out and didn’t get any animals. We did talk about getting catfish and runner ducks, but never quite made the next leap into animal husbandry. Reading about how Manny Howard deals with chickens, ducks, and giant rabbits makes me glad we never got the nerve to try it ourselves. And yet this intimate contact with his own food supple is one of the more important aspects of Manny’s backyard experiment. It’s important to know that chickens aren’t born in shrink-wrap and eggs don’t magically appear in cartons.
As for the rabbits, well, have you seen Roger and Me by Michael Moore? Food or Pet pretty much sums it up. Manny Howard kills countless animals here, usually for no good reason and without even bothering to eat them.
Growing a garden puts a person into contact with parts of the world they never really paid attention to before. The earth becomes something new and alien. The weather becomes important and those storms Manny Howard used to sleep through now wake him up and make him run out to check on his plants, his birds, and his rabbits. Manny leanrs that a green sky is never a good sign.
In the end Manny Howard writes his article and scraps most of The Farm, only keeping the egg laying chickens and a much smaller garden space. My Empire of Dirt was a fun book, and it should make you think twice before running out and buying giant rabbits.
