The Dirty Life

On Farming, Food, and Love

By: Kristin Kimball

Narrated by: Kristin Kimball

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. On an impulse, she shed her city self and started a new farm with him on five hundred acres near Lake Champlain. 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.

Kristin and Mark’s plan to grow everything needed to feed a community was an ambitious idea, and a bit romantic. It worked. 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. 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.

Farm clarity

I loved listening to this book about Kristen's experience with farming. Like so many others, I fantasize about what working on a farm is like. This book highlighted the pain and the pleasure of being a farmer. Not sure if that was a good thing for me!

Downright Dirty (in a fresh way)

I love the gratifying concept of a mindful lifestyle. Having said that, I found it challenging to complete the book, because the narration fell flat for me.

This was so powerful and passionate

i absolutely loved this book, the way it was wrote and the narrators voice. I found myself crying at odd times in the book simply from the weight of the words being spoken. This is a beautiful and honest love story and memoir not sugarcoated by romance but rater romanticised by the wise reflection of her journey.

🤍

This was a relaxing listen, I finished it in one day, and while I'm not ready to buy a farm, I am ready to garden.

Very good!!

Great book!! I really enjoy it when the author reads their own book. Well Done!!