“ The Dirty Life is a delightful, tumultuous, and tender story of the author's love affair with the man who becomes her husband and the farm they work together to restore. 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 book