num_pages: 256
description: Early in The Wisdom of the Radish , Lynda Hopkins admits that she's an aspiring farmer's suburban girlfriend. With this tentative start, she and her boyfriend, Emmett, become the country's newest sodbusters. Their goal is to earn a living wage by growing crops, raising chickens, and selling the fruits of their labor at the local farmers' market. The pair pronounces their two acres, in the Russian River Valley, Foggy River Farm. What at first sounds pastoral and idyllic quickly devolves into crop failures, worm-riddled corn, flood, and an episode involving a fox that's right out of Aesop's Fables. But with perseverance, Mother Nature's strong inclination for plants to grow, and sage counsel from Internet message boards, a working farm rises from humble soil. Hopkins is a winning storyteller, and her agricultural account of seedlings, harvests, chickens, and goats is engaging and gripping. She ruminates on the value of radishes, considering their economic and sentimental profit and loss. She makes the classic greenhorn error of becoming emotionally involved with her chickens, and comes to the shocking realization that her roosters are serial rapists! The transformation that the author undergoes is not so much related to the long hours and the total removal of the word "vacation" from her vocabulary. No, it really comes down to cultivating a sense of belonging to the farm--enough that the farm becomes home and not just a location with an endless set of chores. Sometimes all it takes is a little heart to become more than an aspiring farmer's girlfriend.
language: English
title: The Wisdom of the Radish: And Other Lessons Learned on a Small Farm
publisher: Sasquatch Books