Kimball chucked life as a Manhattan journalist to start a cooperative farm in upstate New York with a self-taught New Paltz farmer she had interviewed for a story and later married. In The Dirty Life, Kristin discovers the wrenching pleasures of physical work, learns that good food is at the center of a good life, falls deeply in love, and finally finds the engagement and commitment she craved in the form of a man, a small town, and a beautiful piece of land.

Every Friday evening, all year round, over a hundred people travel to Essex Farm to pick up their weekly share of the “whole diet”-beef, pork, chicken, milk, eggs, maple syrup, grains, flours, dried beans, herbs, fruits, and forty different vegetables-produced by the farm. Kristin and Mark’s plan to grow everything needed to feed a community was an ambitious idea, and a bit romantic.

The Dirty Life is the captivating chronicle of the couple’s first year on Essex Farm, from the cold North Country winter through their harvest-season wedding in the loft of the barn. On an impulse, she shed her city self and started a new farm with him on five hundred acres near Lake Champlain. When Kristin Kimball left New York City to interview a dynamic young farmer named Mark, her world changed. From a “graceful, luminous writer with an eye for detail” ( Minneapolis Star Tribune), this riveting memoir explores a year on a sustainable farm.

The dirty life farm