Bookshelf    Good Husbandry: A Memoir

Good Husbandry: A Memoir

By Kristin Kimball (Scribner, 2019)

Love pulled Kristin Kimball in 2003 from a writing career in New York City to marriage and 500 acres near Lake Champlain. The ups and downs of the struggle she and her husband Mark underwent to create Essex Farm, a CSA supplying a full diet to 250 people, is recounted in her first memoir, The Dirty Life. Love also fuels this engaging sequel, but, after children, raising farm animals and crops and becoming attuned to the rhythms of farming, Kimball’s love has broadened to embrace even the smallest details of her new life. With humor and insight, she shares the nitty-gritty of farm life: dealing with disease, both human and animal, the vagaries of weather, climate-changed seasons, and the hard work of maintaining farm equipment, all of which she experiences as a wife, a mother, and the leader of hordes of young people who show up eager to learn how to get back to the land. Kimball’s memoir is a treat for armchair farmers, as well as the compelling story of a life well lived.