The Dirty Life

The Dirty Life
by Kristin Kimball

I have posted in my blog sub title that I do book
reviews so here goes. This isn't so much as a review
and quoting favorite parts. At he public library I was
attracted to this book on the shelf because of the barn photo. You know me and my love for old barns. It's a true story about Kristen Kimball, a free lance New York writer who was sent to interview a young farmer on a community organic farm in Pennsylvania. Members pay a yearly fee of 2,900 and can take as much food each week as they can eat.

This story is a romance plus it chronicles Kristen's first year on Essex Farm, all she learns, how difficult the work is and their wedding in the loft of a barn.

I'm not usually one for details and want the story to move along but I enjoyed the many details of farm life and learned from her. I liked her account about her first time to milk a cow, how to slaughter a pig, description of the compost pile. The difficulty of buying draft horses, description of Amish auction.

I wondered why would someone who had a great paying freelance job give it up for farming. I thought of Nanette and how she wants to leave a farming area, although she's not a farmer by any means and head to the big city. Kirsten describes her unfulfilled life in the big city.

Anyway here are some of my favorites passages:
"There is no better commitment than a cow. Her udder knows no exceptions or excuses. She must be milked or she'll suffer from her own fullness, and then she'll get sick and dry up. Morning and evening, on holidays, in good weather and in bad, from the day she gives birth to her calf until the day ten months later when you dry her off, your cow is the frame in which you must fit your days, the twelve-hour tether beyond which you may no longer travel."

Farm
"A farm is a manipulative creature. There is no such thing as finished. Work comes in a stream and has no end. There are only the things that must be done now and things that can be done later. The threat the farm has got on you, the one that keeps you running from can until can't, is this: do it now, or some living thing will wilt or suffer or die. It's blackmail, really."

Weed War
"My existence, from daybreak to dark, became focused on the assassination of weeds....Farming I discovered is a great and ongoing war. The farmers are continually fighting to keep nature behind the hedgerow, and nature is continually fighting to overtake the field......

"If you ever wonder why organic vegetable cost more, blame the weeds. The work on conventional farm that can be done with one pass of the sprayer must, on an organic farm be done continually, from germination to harvest, by physically disrupting the weeds.

Tranquility
A man we know bought up a big piece of good land nearby, a second home, and once, at dinner, I heard him say.'In my retirement, I just want to be a simple farmer. I want...tranquility.' "What you really want is a garden, I thought to myself. A very, very small one. In my experience a tranquil and simple are two things farming work is not. Nor is it lucrative, stable, safe, or easy. Sometimes the work is enough to make you weep. But most days I wake up grateful that I found it-- tripped over it, really -- and that I'm married to someone who feels the same way."

Kristen, there's plenty of cow patties in this book straight from the farm.
I loved listening to her impressions of the hard life of farming but it didn't changed my desire to plant a garden. I don't like playing in the dirt and have never understood those who do. Yet I'm grateful for those who provide food. I'm like the little Red Hen's animal friends. I love the fresh produce but I don't like the work. I have a big guilt complex for not liking gardening and being self sufficient. I would rather play with words than dirt.

I do think there is a trend for community gardens and small farms which raise produce for gardeners' market. Every small town from here to Caldwell has started a Farmers Market.

I highly recommend this book. Well written.

PS there's a lot about food, slathered in onions and butter and fresh herbs.