Stone's Throw Farm

Heard about The Dirty Life? Not dirty as in unmentionable; dirt as in actual soil. It’s Kristin Kimball’s book about Essex Farm, which she and her now-husband (then fiance — the book is subtitled “On Farming, Food, and Love,” but I found the first two topics more interesting) revived and turned into a “whole diet” CSA farm. I recently finished the book and I enjoyed it, but it’s not good bedtime reading, at least not for the farmers and aspiring farmers out there!

Let’s just say many of Kristin’s anxieties about her farm were the same as my anxieties, and though I wasn’t nearly as ambitious as the Kimball’s were their first year at Essex Farm (they took on a lot of animals, for one thing, including draft horses), reading about their exhausting undertaking made me feel . . . well, exhausted. She summed it up pretty well:

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.”

Uplifting, isn’t it? To be fair, Kristin included plenty of humorous and self-deprecating stories (the time she moved the pigs from one barn to another might have been my favorite: “I thought about how the devil is supposed to have a cloven foot, just like the pig”), and her account of the day when winter gave way to spring gave me hope.

Anyone interested in getting a peek at what life is really like on a farm will enjoy this book, and it should probably be required reading for CSA members. Just remember, all you new farmers out there: don’t pick it up at bedtime, at least not if you actually want to get to sleep.