Adult non-fiction: The Dirty Life: On Farming, Food, and Love by Kristen Kimball

The Dirty Life: On Farming, Food, and Love by Kristen Kimball
This is a perfect example of why I love going to the public library or the local bookstore with time to browse and nothing on my "must read" list. I stumbled on this title on a display about gardening and farming as we head into spring, and very much enjoyed it. Granted, it checks a lot of my 'like' boxes: gardening, farming, food cooperatives, rural solitude, natural living, escaping the big city life for peace and quiet in the country (a box very similar to rural solitude -- why are there two boxes?), raising your own food, and on and on. It's no surprise that I was going to like this book. 
Kristen Kimball was a freelance journalist living in Manhattan (New York, not Kansas) when she went to Pennsylvania to interview Mark, a rural farmer with a passion for food cooperatives and the  barter economy. Kimball was smitten; she found reasons to keep returning, fell in love, and eventually married Mark. The two then moved to a neglected farm in rural New York where they hoped to build a community supported agriculture (CSA) program. 
The Dirty Life is the story of their first year on that farm, planting seeds, churning dirt, taking care of livestock, and being told by countless people that their plan had a very slim chance of success. Kimball seems to hold nothing back in the retelling, a great many things did not go according to plan. But some things did go right, and she recounts the frustrations and disappointment as well as the joy of seeing the first plants rise out of the dirt from seeds, and the great celebration of harvest.  "You feel insanely rich, no matter what you own," Kimball writes about the end of the season.
It's very easy for someone with a raised-bed garden in the backyard to dream about life as a farmer, the simplicity, the ease of growing your own food. But Kimball puts a reality check on that sort of daydreaming. Farming is incredibly hard work. Kimball gives plenty of examples of the amount of labor, as well as the tough decisions, that are required for even a small 'hobby' farm, much less a larger farming operation that feeds dozens to hundreds of nearby families.
Give this book to those citified gardeners dreaming of getting away, as well as romantics who might like a love story that literally gets dirty.