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.

Kimball and her husband aim to provide the members of their C.S.A.-all hundred and fifty of them-with a year-round diet, which is, she says, a very “old-fashioned” model of farming.From a 'graceful, luminous writer with an eye for detail' (Minneapolis Star Tribune), this riveting memoir explores a year on a sustainable farm.When Kristin Kimball left New York City to interview a dynamic young farmer named Mark, her world changed. (community-supported agriculture), which revolves around the relationship between the farm and the people who eat from the farm. Essex Farm is powered with draft horses and yields amazing-sounding produce from which Kimball and her husband make simple, delicious dishes like fresh peas cooked in milk with mint and new potatoes. In 2003, Kimball moved with her husband, Mark, to Essex, New York, to start a sustainable farm on five hundred acres. If you are feeling, as I am, a bit shut in this fall if every breath you take is filled with soot, rather than dirt, and the world around you seems painted entirely in shades of grey, then you need a copy of Kristin Kimball’s city-slicker memoir “The Dirty Life.” A few years ago, Kimball was just your average New York City literary hopeful who had worked a variety of jobs-she assisted an agent, taught writing, freelanced as a journalist-until a fortuitous assignment to write about a “very tall and charismatic” farmer who ran a sustainable farm in upstate New York led to love and then to marriage. at the Corner Bookstore, on Madison Ave., and tomorrow night at McNally Jackson, in SoHo. Kristin Kimball is reading tonight at 6 P.M.

The dirty life by kristin kimball