Day 160: My Empire of Dirt

My Empire of Dirt: How One Man Turned His Big-City Backyard into a Farm by Manny Howard.  ISBN: 9781416585169.

So I talked a little bit yesterday about caring for plants.  But I bet you didn't know I actually worked on a farm for a few weekends when I was an undergraduate.  One of the professors lived on a couple of acres and he raised turkeys and vegetables mostly.  A friend and I went out to repair a wooden fence.  This was work I really got into.

Howard didn't much appreciate it because he felt his fence was just aesthetic.  I'm sure his neighbors would disagree with him.  People just don't expect chickens to wander into their yards in big cities.  The professor's was less of a partition fence and more of a corral for the turkeys.

The first step in fixing the fence was to determine which parts of the wood were rotten.  This was accomplished by using the claw of a hammer or the point of a knife.  There's something very satisfying about finding the rotten wood, the way the knife just sinks into it.  Some pieces were so rotten that you'd whack the board with the hammer and it would completely break in two.  Replacing the boards often took two people, one to hold it in place and the other to hammer it down.  Then we would paint it.  We must have replaced 60-some feet of fence over the course of several weekends.

And then there were the turkeys.  We weren't really required to do anything with them, but when the professor asked me to feed the turkeys I was all for it.  It consisted of taking a bucket of table scraps and tossing it the yard and then calling the turkeys.  I did this, only to see the flock rushing towards me and gobbling angrily.  Not knowing what else to do, I turned and bolted back towards the house while my friend sat there laughing her ass off.  I yelled at her to open the door, it was something along the lines of, "Oh shit, oh shit, open the door!"  Of course when I turned around I saw the professors huge dog* herding the turkeys towards to food (and therefore me).

I doubt the turkeys would have actually hurt me, but at the time I panicked and had no clue what else to do.  It's kind of hard to think rationally when you have about twelve 20 pound birds coming at you at what seems an impossible speed for mostly flightless birds.  Turkeys, I have no qualms eating them after that experience.

*He came up to my thigh and I'm 5'8".

My first encounter with this book was via the Colbert Report.  However, I found this to be a pretty accurate review, although I only gave it three stars.

Day 159: My Empire of Dirt

My Empire of Dirt: How One Man Turned His Big-City Backyard into a Farm by Manny Howard.  ISBN: 9781416585169.

I have almost no desire to spend time outside, particularly doing something like gardening.  I am decidedly beyond domesticated, I am leisure-ized.  However, I do have a bit of experience in gardening and there is some small part of me that enjoys it.  The other part just wants to go back inside, pick up my book, and have a beer.

Anyway, my most recent gardening experience was a little more than a year ago.  Anticipating a period of unemployment I took on odd jobs on top of my 25-30 hours of paid work, 10 hours of unpaid practicum work, and 10-15 hours of homework in order to pad my savings a bit (I left graduate school with about $5000).  One of those jobs was weeding a fairly large yard for a former professor, now former coworker, and still good friend of mine.  I had done previous work for her that included feeding her laying and meat chickens when they were still chicks, watching the house, taking in mail, and feeding/caring for her 7 cats and 3 dogs.  The longest stint was for about 2 weeks and I was ready to go home, and this was before the chickens.

So having a good rapport and being familiar with her home already, she asked if I would like to weed her flower beds.  Since she was and is a good reference and an even better friend, I agreed.  Besides, I could use the money and the forced time spent in the daylight and the dirt.  There is definitely something to be said about working with the ground and plant matter.  I received a great deal of satisfaction watching the weeds pile up and the beds start to look less cluttered and more cultured.  I even enjoyed correctly identifying the poison ivy, although the resulting blisters were much less enjoyable.

But the idea of maintaining a yard for a long period of time has absolutely no appeal to me.  I would feel guilty not being out in it if I had a nice yard, and feel even more guilt when the yard goes to pot, which it inevitably would if I had one.  I enjoy the benefits of lawn and grass and beautiful flowers, but I don't like the necessity it creates.  Which is funny, because this blog necessitates the crap out of me.

My first encounter with this book was via the Colbert Report.  However, I found this to be a pretty accurate review, although I only gave it three stars.