The trials and tribulations of backyard farming

This story was originally reported by PRI’s The Takeaway. For more, listen to the audio above.

In tough economic times, people often start growing their own vegetables. But pastoral visions of harvesting prize-winning crops from your back yard sometimes clash with the harsh realities of actually farming.

“It’s extraordinarily hard,” Manny Howard told PRI’s “The Takeaway.” For one month, Howard tried to live exclusively off what he could grow on his 800-square-foot Brooklyn backyard, with the exception of salt, pepper and coffee.

“I knew it was going to be hard when I started,” said Howard, “and I can’t tell you how much harder it was than I had imagined it was going to be.”

The new book, My Empire of Dirt: How One Man Turned His Big-City Backyard into a Farm, chronicles the Howard’s quest for modern, urban homesteading. He nearly lost his finger to a table saw, his marriage was pushed to the brink of disaster and he couldn’t get his rabbits to reproduce. He did, however, learn to raise chickens for laying eggs, and his family hasn’t bought eggs since 2007.

Overall, Howard says the book helped him gain a “new understanding of how hard it is to break our transactional relationship with food.”

That understanding doesn’t always come cheap, though. Writing for the New York Times blogs, Michael Tortorello spent nearly $1,000 and more than 47 hours trying to grow food in his backyard. For that, he grew about $190 worth of vegetables. He writes, “I was, and am, skeptical of claims that gardening will save money.”

The benefits, however, don’t always show up on balance sheets, according to the experts Tortorello talked to. He writes, “Gardening, they intimated, is a passion — and who gauges the pleasure of his latest tryst by counting the kisses with a clicker?”

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