The Dirty Life: On Farming, Food, and Love Audiobook (Free)

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. With an impulse, she shed her city self and started a new plantation with him on 500 acres near Lake Champlain. The Dirty Lifestyle is the captivating chronicle of the couple’s first calendar year on Essex Farm, from the frosty North Country winter season through about The Dirty Existence: On Farming, Meals, and Love their harvest-season wedding ceremony in the loft of the barn.

Kristin and Tag’s intend to grow everything had a need to give food to a community was an ambitious idea, and a little romantic. It worked. Every Friday night, all year round, over a hundred people travel to Essex Farm to pick up their weekly share from the “entire diet”—meat, pork, chicken, dairy, eggs, maple syrup, grains, flours, dried out beans, natural herbs, fruits, and forty different vegetables—made by the farm. In The Dirty Lifestyle, Kristin discovers the wrenching pleasures of physical work, learns that good food reaches the center of an excellent existence, falls deeply in love, and finally finds the engagement and commitment she craved by means of a man, a small town, and a lovely parcel.