Backyard experiment has a business purpose.

• Author: Taylor, Mike
• Position: SMALL [biz] - Editorial

Credit - or blame - for the experiment taking shape behind my house goes to a guy named Manny Howard, a freelance writer who set out to subsist for a month on what he could grow himself in his Brooklyn, N.Y., backyard.

Howard's attempt was only marginally successful: complicated by a tornado, halted for a few days by a stomach bug and compromised by a non-backyard dinner on his birthday. But his account of it in New York magazine in 2007 was hilarious and inspiring, and when the story found its way to me last year, I suppose the seed was planted.

Sometime in the last year I decided I was going to try it, too: live for one month entirely off what I could grow in my Denver backyard. Nutritionally off the grid. Or, as Howard put it: to not only narrow the gap between where my food is produced and where it's consumed, but erase that gap entirely.

Sure, it would be hard, I thought, but it's only for a month. Heck, Scott O'Grady, the downed Air Force pilot, lived on nothing but rainwater and bugs for six days.

So I've been at it since late winter, growing spinach, squash and pea seedlings in plastic trays with ultraviolet lights, hauling compost-soil mix from Pioneer Sand Co. in my 1984 Nissan/Datsun pickup, building a chicken coop for four hens that haven't started laying yet, erecting a fence around the garden to keep out squirrels, rabbits and dogs, picking up pointers on growing potatoes from the nursery down the street.

It's apparent now, mid-June and no crops other than a few peas and some spinach even close to harvestable, that September would have been a better "execution" month. But I already had plans to meet friends in the barbecue mecca of Memphis in early September, so by default August became the month of reckoning.

I don't expect this to prove anything. Before World War II thousands of American households were self-sustaining, or close to it. Thousands probably still are but don't see anything noteworthy about it. I would just like to know how hard it would be to feed myself for a month. I suspect I'll appreciate farmers more when the experiment is over, if nothing else.

There is a business-journalism purpose to it, too. My plan, as I've begun to chronicle this experiment at cobizmag.com in blogs and videos, is to borrow from TV's 'This Old House" format where in the course of renovating a house, Norm and Steve tackle various challenges by introducing local entrepreneurs and craftsmen with specialties...