I’ve learned many things in the years since my life took this wild turn toward the dirt. Some members still shop regularly at the grocery store for convenience food, produce out of season, and things that we can’t provide like citrus fruit, but we and some of the others live pretty much on what we produce.
For this our members pay us $2,900 per person per year and can take as much food each week as they can eat, plus extra produce, during the growing season, to freeze or can for winter. We supply beef, chicken, pork, eggs, milk, maple syrup, grains, flours, dried beans, herbs, fruits, and forty different vegetables. Our goal is to provide everything they need to have a healthy and satisfying diet, year-round. These “members” come to the farm every Friday to pick up their share of what we’ve produced. We raise hogs and beef cattle and chickens on pasture, and at butchering time we make fresh and dried sausages, pancetta, corned beefs, pâtés, and quarts of velvety stock. We milk our cows by hand and their milk is very rich and the butter we make from the cream is taxicab yellow. We have a sugar bush, the beginnings of an orchard, an abundance of pasture and hay ground, and perennial gardens of herbs and flowers. Our small fields are bordered by hedgerow and woodlot. The farm is highly diversified, and most of the work is done by horses instead of tractors. The fertility comes from composted manure and tilled-in cover crops. Mark and I are both first-generation farmers.The farm we’ve built together could be described as antique or very modern, depending on who you ask. In preparation for Kimball’s visit to the market tomorrow (see schedule above), we thought we’d present our e-letters with a small sample of this compelling, honest book. The real me stays out until four, wears heels, and carries a handbag, but this character I’m playing gets up at four, wears Carhartts, and carries a Leatherman.” In the book’s prologue, excerpted below, Kimball writes: “There are still moments when I feel like an actor in a play. The memoir takes readers along on her path from New York City (where she works as a journalist and lives in a rent controlled studio apartment), to the sprawling, ramshackle farm in Upstate New York she tranforms with her farmer husband. Its rare to find a book about farming that is as beautifully written as Kristin Kimball’s The Dirty Life.
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