Good Husbandry: A Memoir
Written by Kristin Kimball
Narrated by Kristin Kimball
4.5/5
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About this audiobook
The Dirty Life chronicled Kimball’s move from New York City to 500 acres near Lake Champlain where she started a new farm with her partner, Mark. In Good Husbandry, she reveals what happened over the next five years at Essex Farm.
Farming has many ups and downs, and the middle years were hard for the Kimballs. Mark got injured, the weather turned against them, and the farm faced financial pressures. Meanwhile, they had two small children to care for. How does one traverse the terrain of a maturing marriage and the transition from being a couple to being a family? How will the farm survive? What does a family need in order to be happy?
Kristin chose Mark and farm life after having a good look around the world, with a fair understanding of what her choices meant. She knew she had traded the possibility of a steady paycheck, of wide open weekends and spontaneous vacations, for a life and work that was challenging but beautiful and fulfilling. So with grit and grace and a good sense of humor, she chose to dig in deeper.
Featuring some of the same local characters and cherished animals first introduced in The Dirty Life, (Jet the farm dog, Delia the dairy cow, and those hardworking draft horses), plus a colorful cast of aspiring first-generation farmers who work at Essex Farm to acquire the skills they need to start sustainable farms of their own, Good Husbandry “considers what it means to build a good, happy life, and how we are tested in that endeavor” (Mary Beth Keane, New York Times bestselling author of Ask Again, Yes).
Kristin Kimball
Kristin Kimball is a farmer and a writer living in northern New York. Prior to farming, Kimball worked as a freelance writer, writing teacher, and as an assistant to a literary agent in New York City. A graduate of Harvard University and the author of The Dirty Life and Good Husbandry, she and her husband Mark have run Essex Farm since 2003, where they live with their two daughters.
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Reviews for Good Husbandry
58 ratings6 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I like her style a clean vocabulary. And A great story teller!!
1 person found this helpful
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The writer made you feel like you were walking thru her life with her. A gifted writer.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I'm middle aged, farming (but on a much much smaller scale), we both work off farm jobs but my main job is value added products for market. I literally cried when the wall came down because that's where I am in life. Sick to death of this shabby house and all it's dysfunction. This gives me so much hope and reaffirms my willingness to try and stay and make it work. Thank you for this, yet another great book.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Awesome! It doesn't matter what your occupation is. It's a must read.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I have been waiting for this book, and the anticipation makes it all the sweeter. I love that Kimball perfectly tempers the gritty reality of farm work with the pleasures that make it worthwhile -- she doesn't pull any punches, she's relentlessly honest about relationships, and she tells a story with a deft hand. Between her moments of natural beauty, delicious foods, deep love of horses and her children we get the meandering stories of hardships and heartbreak and hard experiences. Much like her volatile partnership with her husband, Mark, it works, and works beautifully. I appreciate her willingness to let the world look in on what they are doing at Essex Farm.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Having first met Kristin Kimball in THE DIRTY LIFE, we follow up now to see how her marriage to Mark and Essex Farm are doing.Well, one observation of hers that I liked was an interesting angle on the by-now over-observed 'curated' nature of our lives today. Someday, she said, future generations will look back on how we only showed a positive picture of our personal lives, and marvel at what a load of shit it was, the way we look back at the Victorians and their ostensibly prudish mores and know that they got down and did the nasty just like every other generation.So Kimball purports to pull back the curtain a bit and show us some of the miserable bits of existence on a farm with a nutjob husband who wants to dress the kids in sacks. But of course, overall the, arc of the book has to bend towards positivity, or else it wouldn't be a product of its time; or else, nobody in this time would want to read it.The second kid they have basically wrecks everything. Kimball starts to feel separated from the farm and its work and from Mark as she spends all her time taking care of babies and cooking.It's so easy to see the solutions to other people's problems - that's why I like reading advice columns so much. I wanted to shout, YOU'RE DOING TOO MUCH. Why do you guys think you have to fee the entire town? Feed yourselves - and a few extra people as gravy! You can do that easy! At no time or place in history did an entire town get fed from a single freaking farm. What on earth do you think you're trying to do?As for the martial problems, I wanted to shout: is Kristen a partner in this farm business or is she a hired hand? If she's a partner, why can't she decide to spend a few dollars improving a room in the house, or taking a freaking afternoon off to go to Plattsburgh - with the kids, to buy a piece of plumbing equipment for chirssakes - it's not like she even wanted to go there to buy shoes, although that should have been perfectly acceptable too. You know, world, not every physical step taken in a marriage has to be we, we, we.I really liked DIRTY LIFE and I still like reading Kimball because I share her feelings about growing and cooking food. I envied the meals she described making - not because they sounded so delicious, though I'm sure they were, or creative or anything, but because they were all so hard-earned, which is its own special sauce. Some people aim to work hard and play hard. I wish I could work hard and eat hard. I really like that about vacations where we bike & hike - I like basically wrecking our bodies all day so we can just fill them up with abandon at the end.Anyway as we feel Kimball's worry and read about their privation through hardships and setbacks on the farm, only towards the end of the book does she mention the help they got from a royalty check from her first book. It made me conk myself on the head and say, oh yeah, there is that. They did have an alternate potential source of income this whole time, which she never mentions - she's a writer. They aren't only holding on by their fingernails on the farm.One last observation is about how they struggled with flooding; their farm is low-lying and they had no drainage until some weirdo in town decided to voluntarily finance it for them out of the blue. She touches on the realization that the 'bad' years of wetness actually were outnumbering the 'good' years, and it takes years for people to slowly realize that a particular piece of land or region of the country maybe isn't all that suited to what they envisioned doing with it during an odd beautiful year. Reminds me of an old quote I read about early white settlers in New England, to the effect of, "When I think of the glowing pictures of this place that they wrote to us back home, I can only think, they must have been writing during strawberry time."In the end things started looking up for Essex Farm. Key things seemed to be the book royalties, and opening up their market to the rich weirdoes in NYC. Yay rich weirdoes.