The first time I grew tomatoes, i fertilized them every morning. They died. Last summer my cabbage crop became so infested with cabbage worms I decided to raise cabbage worms. Three years ago a friend gave me a few chicks, and I have since owned a total of eight. The last one got dragged off last week by a possum. I don’t tell about the others.

In My Empire of Dirt (Scribner), Manny Howard’s memoir of a recent spring, summer, and fall, we learn that Howard not only plants a backyard garden, he runs a small farm back there. He has eight hundred square feet to work with. Howard’s house is in Brooklyn, as in the Big Apple.

We discover at the outset of Dirt that Howard has been challenged to live for at least thirty days on what he can grow in a season. His attempt to meet that challenge is the bread and butter of this fast-paced, funny, suspenseful, sometimes philosophical book.

Howard plants tomatoes, collards, eggplants, callaloo, cabbage, beets, peppers, pumpkins, squash, leek, fennel, figs, herbs, cantaloupe, and beans. He raises animals. He injures himself, almost gives up, falters, and finally staggers toward the finish line.

As he begins his experiment, Howard realizes that his subject is both complicated and simple. On the complicated side, he understands that the availability of food from the supermarket is the result of “unyielding complexity. The product of an authorless tangle of relationships—human, commercial, political, industrial, biological, and chemical—that will never be fully sorted. What does having food available at almost a moment’s notice, twenty-four hours a day, really require of us?”

On the simple side, Howard believes (early on) that life on the farm will be “a series of spare declarations. I plant potatoes. I water potatoes. I harvest potatoes. I boil potatoes. I eat potatoes....At least that is my theory.”

Imagine removing trees from your backyard to clear the way for garden sunshine. Picture yourself getting up before dawn every day to feed various animals, and even drown some. To dig and replant. To weed. To witness birth, death, maggots. All this in Brooklyn, with the enormous task of finding viable suppliers nearby.

Reading My Empire of Dirt allows the vicarious pleasure of watching Howard work: clearing away a tree; trucking in dirt; plowing; planting; dealing with bad weather, with heartbreak, with harvesting, and yes, with the glory.

The book is also a tribute to its spiritual godfather, Wendell Berry, the prolific writer who has lived on his family farm in Kentucky for decades. Howard quotes Berry throughout, introducing him to readers perhaps unfamiliar with his call to love the natural world.

Before I continue, I must tell a story from the book. Howard has a serious accident involving his hand during the course of his farming, which he describes to a Texas farmer named Robert Lee O’Neill. O’Neill, in turn, tells about his loss of four fingers when a gate crushed them off, how he wrapped his hand and ran back to look for his fingers in the dust before rushing off to the doctor.

“The doctor managed to put all three of them back on without too much fuss at all,” he says, clearly still grateful and a little bit surprised.

“Three? Why didn’t the surgeon reattach all four?” I ask.

“The dog beat me to the fourth one…”

By the book’s end, Howard has “joined the fraternity of old men with gnarly fingers,” which is, he writes, “the real price of chicken.”

So many of us in the South are descended from farmers. We’ve heard stories and looked at old photos that perhaps tug us toward that ancient life. Today, within the daily “frame” of our lives, most of us don’t sweat on the job. We are not pressed daily with life and death decisions. We sit in front of some sort of screen right much.

If we were stationed years ago on the farm, our daily frame wouldn’t resemble today’s. And therein lies one of the enchantments of Manny Howard’s narrative. It allows us to glimpse the ancient frame, to listen to a man who lived through a sliver of a lifetime on the farm.