From a “graceful, luminous writer with an eye for detail” (Minneapolis Star Tribune), this riveting memoir explores a year on the sustainable farm.

When Kristin Kimball still left New York City to interview a active young farmer named Mark, her world changed. On an impulse, she shed her city self and began a new farm with him on five hundred acres near Lake Champlain. The Dirty Life is the captivating chronicle from the couple’s first calendar year on Essex Farm, from the frosty North Country wintertime through about The Dirty Existence: On Farming, Meals, and Like their harvest-season wedding ceremony in the loft of the barn.

Kristin and Mark’s plan to grow everything had a need to give food to a community was an ambitious idea, and a little romantic. It proved helpful. Every Friday night time, all year round, over a hundred people travel to Essex Farm to pick up their weekly talk about of the “entire diet”—meat, pork, chicken, milk, eggs, maple syrup, grains, flours, dried beans, herbal products, fruits, and forty different vegetables—made by the plantation. In The Dirty Life, Kristin discovers the wrenching pleasures of physical function, learns that great food reaches the guts of a good existence, falls deeply in like, and finally finds the engagement and commitment she craved in the form of a man, a small town, and a beautiful piece of land.